"Recently, a welcome new development... was laid on the table while neighbors fight to save the 'historic' Wonder Bar building."

"The alleged reason? It was frequented by Chicago mobsters in the 1930s. Seriously, folks? The building, which has no particularly interesting architectural characteristics, should be preserved because murderers used to eat there?... It’s a ridiculous argument on its face. Yet, the developer will take time and spend money to try to work it out. That will only add to the cost of the project and those costs will eventually find their way into rental payments, assuming the project gets built at all... What may be behind this is Madison’s dislike for tall buildings. The proposal would be 18 stories tall... Too often, I think, the [historic preservation] movement allows itself to be captured by people who just don’t like tall and big buildings in any form. "

Writes Dave Cieslewicz (a former mayor of Madison) in Isthmus.

What counts as a tall building where you live? What counts as too tall, such that the locals resist? What does it take to unleash bullshit about historic value? 

Why do people object to tallness? I think the downtown would look better if the streets were solidly packed with tall buildings, creating urban canyons, and not just because I enjoy walking in shade.

Now, let me read Wikipedia article "High-rise Building":

Bernie sets the terms: "you cannot be a moderate and a progressive."

You can be a moderate. You can be a progressive. But you cannot be a moderate and a progressive.

— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) February 3, 2016

Sad, if true, I think, but it's really just defining the terms. Progressive = immoderate. I note that's Bernie's definition. If I were personally attached to the word "progressive," I'd fight to define it, but I'm not, so I'll keep my distance.

Bernie's been tweeting a lot about these words. It's between him and Hillary. There's also this:

Q. Do you think @HillaryClinton is a progressive?
A. Some days, yes. Other days she announces she is a moderate.https://t.co/kIdhjzXZDs

— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) February 3, 2016

ADDED: Whatever happened to the word "socialist"? If Bernie has replaced "socialist" — in referring to his own politics — with "progressive," then he's appropriated "progressive" as a euphemism, and it's a slick move to say that other people can't use this euphemism for whatever it is they need to cover. If I remember correctly, Hillary adopted the word "progressive" in order to avoid "liberal," because somehow the fine word "liberal" had become pejorative in our supposedly center-left American political culture. "Liberal" connoted left-wing, and Hillary sought a more moderate image with the label "progressive."  I can see Bernie calling her on that, but she could turn around and pin "socialist" on him. That should be a powerful move.

AND: Meade dug up this Isthmus piece written by Madison's ex-mayor Dave Cieslewicz last December:

Americans cringe at the word “socialism,” and no mainstream politician except Sanders identifies himself as such. Sanders could have run from the label and tried to recast himself the way most liberals do these days as a “progressive.” Instead he essentially said, “Damn right I’m a socialist. I’m proud of it. Here’s what it means to me, and here’s why I believe my views are in keeping with mainstream American values going back to Franklin Roosevelt.”...

... I wish we would hear this kind of sterling defense from [Hillary Clinton] for a word that she should embrace: liberal. Sanders’ reason and courage is something liberal Democrats should take to heart....

Ha ha. Both of them have sought refuge in "progressive."

"Because I was wearing a Wisconsin golf shirt and Wisconsin football hat, the Iowa Republican guy running the thing said, 'Must be a Scott Walker guy!'"

"Caught off guard and not wanting to be impolite, I just said, 'Uh, no.' The guy looked quizzical, so in order not to blow my cover and to make the most mischief possible I blurted out, 'Trump! I’m for Trump!' He nodded knowingly."

Madison's ex-mayor Dave Cieslewicz goes to the Iowa State Fair (which he says isn't as good as the Wisconsin State Fair). Dave is, of course (need I say it?), not a Republican (but then neither is Donald Trump).

"This is a man so polarizing and so intensely disliked in his home state that he can’t show his face in his own Capitol building."

"[Scott Walker] has to be smuggled in and out like 'El Chapo,' the Mexican drug lord who escaped from prison the other day through a drainage pipe," writes former Madison mayor Dave Cieslewicz.

This is totally contrary to the Wisconsin tradition. This reporter told me that he would often just wait around the East Wing until Walker’s predecessor, Jim Doyle, showed up for work and buttonhole him right there for an interview. He said Doyle always accommodated. And he told me that Doyle’s predecessor, Tommy Thompson, would go a step further, actually calling out to reporters through the rotunda when he wanted to do an interview.

Did anything like this ever happen to Doyle or Thompson?

When Obama came to Milwaukee on Labor Day, he did a photo op with Governor Walker but not with Walker's Democratic Party opponent Mary Burke.

Why? Apparently, it's because Walker wanted to be seen with Obama and Mary Burke did not want to be seen with Obama. So, again: why? Citizen Dave (former Madison Mayor Dave Cieslewicz) says that Burke didn't want to seem "too close (metaphorically and literally) to an unpopular president," and Walker chose to highlight "Burke's unwillingness to stand with the president symbolically." Walker "had nothing to risk."

I'd put that more positively: Walker is a Republican hanging onto his popularity in a blue-to-purple state, and showing his relaxed camaraderie with Obama makes him seem moderate and able to work with others. It's similar to Chris Christie, when he was up for reelection in 2012, walking with Obama amid the wreckage of Hurricane Sandy. Except Christie was making a play for help after the disaster and risked looking as though he wasn't conservative enough for Republicans who might reconsider whether he's the right fit as a 2016 presidential candidate. But Walker needs nothing from Obama, and he benefits from looking capable of relating to Democrats. He's in no danger of seeming as if he's secretly liberal. His conservative credentials are firmly established, and no one would think he was aligned with Obama. So he's free to do photo ops just to look friendly and normal... and dignified and substantial.

But back to Burke. The President, her party's leader, comes to her state, and she avoids him? Citizen Dave says that "Burke campaign's strategists -- they're thinking too much." Her campaign strategists? What about her?  Dave says: "It seems to me that when your party's president shows up in your state, a gubernatorial candidate should just go stand with him, tell the crowd that he's great, and let him say the same thing about her. Nobody would hold that against Mary Burke." But do we hold it against her when she avoids him? It seems timid, at the very least, and, indeed, Dave proceeds to talk about her missing an opportunity to fire up "the base... especially African Americans."

Would the people in the middle really have held it against her if she'd stood with the President? Dave seems to think there was no risk, but Obama's Labor Day visit was quite union-oriented. He spoke on a stage where the scenery was a lot of people in AFSCME t-shirts and at least one prominent blue fist t-shirt. I think Ms. Burke had something to worry about there, looking too connected to the public employee unions.



The Democratic Party's "base" here in Wisconsin may love that visualization of our state as a blue fist, but I think it's offputting to those of us in the middle who see the value of peace and good order and who will probably determine the outcome of the election.

ADDED: I'm just now reading Christian Schneider's piece and realizing that Mary Burke was present on the stage (of what was called "Laborfest") and that she departed at the point when Obama began speaking:

Burke's desire to avoid being photographed with the unpopular president is particularly comical, given that everyone knows that her jailbreak was entirely a product of campaign strategy....

Yet Burke's photo op had to be sacrificed at the altar of campaign "strategy."...

Burke wanted to avoid the visual of standing near Obama because she knows the picture would be run over and over to equate her politics with the president's....

[Burke] may even get the chance to dodge Obama again before the big election. The only question will be why he allows her to disrespect him so — if he comes back, he should jump into the background of every photo op in which she takes part. Call it the "Photobama." 

AND: For the original post, I took my facts from Mayor Dave, who wrote: "Mary Burke, who attended the rally, did not appear on-stage with the president." Based on that, I speculated that she might not have liked the t-shirt scenery, especially the blue fist. But now I think I understand that she was on the stage and she ducked out specifically to avoid appearing with Obama. That's really flagrant Obama-shunning, and I withdraw my speculation that she might have had the alternative motivation of wanting to avoid the appearance of too close an alliance with the public unions that Governor Walker is known for having tamed.

"No one in their right mind wants to carry a loaded firearm in public or have one around the house."

"The chances that you will kill or injure yourself or someone you know are far greater than that you will shoot a 'bad guy.' According to the Brady Campaign, a gun in the home is 22 times more likely to kill or injure a family member in a domestic argument, accident or suicide than it is to be used to stop an intruder. Wanting to carry a concealed weapon indicates a level of paranoia or poor judgment that is unfortunate in a private citizen, but in my view, absolutely disqualifying in a person who wants to be Wisconsin's top law enforcement official."

From a column by Madison's former Mayor Dave Cieslewicz, denouncing Jefferson County District Attorney Susan Happ, a candidate for for Wisconsin attorney general in tomorrow's Democratic Party primary, because she applied for a concealed carry permit.

"The ever-grumpy, constantly complaining union leadership at AFSCME and WEAC alienated non-union taxpayers who were paying the bills."

"They used language that sounded like they were defending Pennsylvania coal miners in 1911 instead of office workers and teachers with very good benefits and fine working conditions in 2011. If unions want to reclaim their relevance, it would be a good thing to ban use of the word 'solidarity' as well as anything that rhymes with 'hey, ho' forever more."

Writes Citizen Dave, Dave Cieslewicz, the former mayor of Madison, Wisconsin). He's saying that from the left and right after assuring readers (at the lefty newspaper Isthmus) that he "hated how Gov. Scott Walker demonized schoolteachers and public employees during the Act 10 debate" — which is ludicrous, Scott Walker was demonized by the protesters, but he was completely restrained, almost to the point of dead silence, and didn't demonize anybody — but my point here is that Walker-hater Cieslewicz is sick of the way lefties talk about government workers and their unions.

I read that part and said: "He sounds like me." I was thinking particularly of a post of mine from March 15, 2011: "In the Wisconsin Capitol rotunda, protesters — not noticing the self-dramatization — sing about how they're standing up to 'goons and ginks and company finks' and how one day they'll 'be free.'"

I edited [the video] to heighten the absurdity of appropriating the civil rights song "We Shall Overcome" (about not being free) and that "Stickin' to the Union" song (about facing union-busting violence).

The protests have been on behalf of well-paid people with excellent jobs — better jobs than the average Wisconsinite's. And the protesters got massive extra doses of freedom to express themselves in the state capitol for over a month, without any threats of violence or even arrest for the crimes they committed in full view of the police. I mean, I know they have their complaints, but they are not even the bottom sector of the Wisconsin economy. If there were to be a class struggle here, they would be taken aback to find themselves in the role they actually have in this economy: the oppressors!

AND: By the way, the singing group in my video called themselves "The Solidarity Singers," so Citizen Dave's saying "ban use of the word 'solidarity'" has got to feel like a direct affront.

"Will de Blasio's promise to let developers build larger and taller in exchange for creating affordable housing overwhelm neighborhoods with hulking buildings that hurt the quality of life?"

That's what "some advocates and preservationists" are asking.

I think if you click through and look at the design, you'll scream yes.

If the developers want people to accept huge buildings, why do they make them so ugly?

Here's Madison's little big-building controversy, as presented by our former mayor Dave Cieslewicz. Don't miss the comments section, with much participation by Stu Levitan, who leads the Landmark Commission that rejected the proposal. ("This column is a disgrace, and shows a shocking disregard for both facts and the laws....")

Here's some background on Levitan, an article that ends, "'Yes, I still have Nixon’s balls,' Stu Levitan said. 'Thanks for asking.'"

I've mentioned Levitan before on this blog, for example in the post "'So Meade, in your marriage, which one of you is the whore?' A question asked in the webpages of Isthmus by Madison politico Stu Levitan." That was back before Meade got blocked from participating in the Isthmus forum for speaking inappropriately. (Isthmus is the Madison alt newspaper, i.e., the main newspaper in Madison. And here's an old post of mine that records ex-Mayor Dave's interaction with Meade at the Isthmus.)

ADDED: Clicking around writing this post, I got to this old piece of Dave's that has Meade in the comments, and I see that Stu Levitan is also in the comments there. Dave's topic is college football, and Meade, commenting with his full name, Laurence Meade, writes:

It's a free market, Dave. Plenty of schools don't have sports. Go to one of those schools.

As far as brain injuries, what else are you going to ban - riding in cars? bicycling? taking showers? drinking alcohol?

"They don't have a candidate, but Democrats increasingly have a message for the 2014 gubernatorial race..."

"... Wisconsin is falling behind Minnesota, and it's Scott Walker's fault."

Just minutes after learning of better economic news in Minnesota than Wisconsin in 2012, progressives took to their keyboards and began blaming "extremist" policies enacted in our state in the last two years, in prose so purple it could have been on a Vikings football jersey.

There is one big problem with this argument: Wisconsin has been falling behind Minnesota for a long, long time....

A Madison, WI proposal to authorize community street painting projects to "bring people together."

We're not talking about water soluble paint, but permanent paint jobs, the equivalent of murals, but on the horizontal surface that cars drive on. The alderwoman who proposes the new ordinance — Marsha Rummel — got the idea from Portland, Oregon, "where community members paint an intersection to give it a sense of place and create a public square."

There would be a permit process, including a petition "indicating approval from at least 60 percent residents, businesses and non-residential properties within a 200-foot radius of the proposed location"  and "assurances for the city that hold the design's applicant responsible for maintenance of the painting and requires them to have insurance." (I'm quoting the Cap Times article, not the ordinance, so I don't know whom to blame for the irritating ambiguity.)

"You can't just say you want to come in and do this. It needs to be maintained over time. Paint fades. It needs to be repainted from time to time, just as we go and repaint traffic lines," said Arthur Ross, the city's pedestrian-bicycle coordinator.

Which is why it's obviously a terrible idea.

"What it really is is a community building activity. It gets people out of their houses and working on something together," Ross said.

And what about when it breaks them apart because it's ugly, it makes the neighborhood look trashy, and it's not properly maintained.  I loathe these government dreams of bringing people together. Leave us alone! I know it's Madison, but people have their own private ways of getting together.

"I rarely read the comments at the bottom of my blogs and I almost never respond. I'm ambivalent at best about sparking a dialogue."

"The reason I don't do social writing is that occasionally I actually do read the comments. There's this one guy (hi Laurence!) who writes a comment almost every time I happen to look at them and it's almost always something along the lines of what a liberal idiot I am."

Interestingly, Laurence — that is to say, our Meade — never calls Citizen Dave (the erstwhile Mayor Dave of Madison, Wisconsin) an "idiot." That's Dave's paraphrase.

To paraphrase is to reveal the inner workings of one's own mind. If someone holds up a mirror and you say "I look like an idiot," is the mirror-holder calling you an idiot?

I've rarely read anything associated with my writing — or for that matter with online news stories or columns — that I would consider worth my time or anyone else's.

In short, if that's blogging, then I'm not doing it and never will. Blogging does not work in any useful way as a form of social intercourse. The small number of people who comment seem very angry and very bitter. Why would you want to spend your time with them?

"It's a free market, Dave. Plenty of schools don't have sports. Go to one of those schools."

Over at Isthmus, the Madison "alternative" newspaper, Meade takes on former mayor/current columnist Dave Cieslewicz who's fretting about all the money spent on college football and the unpaid athletes and their incipient brain damage.

As far as brain injuries, what else are you going to ban - riding in cars? bicycling? taking showers? drinking alcohol?

Pushing back is local politico Stu Levitan, misspelling Meade's first name and gratuitously insulting him:

Lawrence, are you really asserting that the number of brain injuries from showering equals the number of brain injuries from football? My, you are a silly little fellow!

Meade is all:

Stw, what I am asserting is that football is only one of many activities which can lead to traumatic brain injury. Your question reflects poor reading comprehension. Is it possible that you bumped your head while playing Chutes and Ladders when you were a child?

Or maybe you didn't play that game. Maybe you, Cowboy Stu, and your family played Go To The Head Of The Class. You probably should've worn a helmet.

Like Dave!

This is what it's like in a clash of who-knows-how-damaged male brains of Madison.

AND: If you've got a craving for any old-time kids' games, please use the Althouse portal to Amazon. And I recommend Candy Land. Because they don't want you to eat candy.

Madison, where the powerful bike lobby pushes for policies that will get 20% of workers commuting by bike...

... bicycle commuting dropped to only 4.69% in 2011. The previous year it was 6.03%.

The bike lobby folks disparage the survey, which asked people how they got to work in the previous week. Maybe the question was asked after a week of nasty weather. Of course, here in Wisconsin, it's frequently too cold or rainy for anyone other than a hardcore bicyclist.

The number of people walking (8.38 percent) and using a motorcycle (0.15 percent) to get to work edged down slightly. The number who said they took public transportation to work (8.79 percent) inched up, and those who drove to work alone rose to 65.46 percent from 63.42 percent.

This is America, people. We drive. We have a lifestyle built on cars. Do you mind?

Arthur Ross, Madison's pedestrian-bicycle coordinator, could not be reached Thursday for comment, but data from the city paint a picture of steady growth for bike commuters. According to a 2011 report by the city's traffic engineering department, the annual average volume on the John Nolen Drive and Brittingham Park bike paths has steadily climbed since 1987, when an average of 400 bikes per day used the paths. In 2011, the number, according to the bike counts, had more than doubled to about 975 bikes per day.

Yes, but are these people biking to work? Or are we talking about people who bike for exercise/pleasure on weekends and off hours, mostly concentrated in the pleasantest times of the year? I know I bike those paths a lot, but not as a method of commuting.

Meanwhile the 20% goal lives on, with influential politicos hyping expensive improvements (or supposed improvements) as if people will shift to bicycle commuting. I find it amusing that my liberal city puts so much tax money into amenities that serve, overwhelmingly, its white male population.

"The students who make it to us (and especially the ones who end up in schools like Harvard) have learned exactly what they have to do to succeed..."

"... and sadly, that often has very little to do with becoming educated.... Instead, it’s almost solely about figuring out what will be asked (in papers, tests, and other assessments), learning that material long enough to produce it when necessary, and then moving on to the next thing."

That's an article about the cheating scandal at Harvard. It made me think back to this statement from University of Wisconsin historian Bill Cronin, that "he felt his job as a professor was to make his students 'fall in love with the world.'"

What I like about about Cronin's statement, as opposed to the quote from the Harvard-cheating-scandal article, is that it's the professor taking responsibility and not putting the blame on the students. There's also something wistful and weird about what Cronin said. It's wistful, because it's a vision of a job that can't really be accomplished, even as you might admire the prof for thinking of himself that way. It's also weird because... fall in love... and with the world.... Why the romantic/sexual metaphor? (I know there are forms of love other than eros, but you don't fall into them.) And why is the love object the world, rather than the subject matter?

Cronin's a historian, so maybe the world is the subject matter for him, and in that understanding, the lawprof's job is to make students fall in love with the law.

Or is it: fall in love with criticizing the legal system? I've got a lawprof right here: Elizabeth Warren, the lawprof Senate candidate who spoke at the DNC last night and told the world that the system is rigged:

People feel like the system is rigged against them. And here's the painful part: they're right. The system is rigged. Look around. Oil companies guzzle down billions in subsidies. Billionaires pay lower tax rates than their secretaries. Wall Street CEOs—the same ones who wrecked our economy and destroyed millions of jobs—still strut around Congress, no shame, demanding favors, and acting like we should thank them.

Not love. Anger.

She's a professor at Harvard, that place where the students have figured out what will be asked and learned just enough to produce it when necessary and then move on to the next thing. Which is to say: politics. Do you love it? It's the world and if it's rigged, is it possible that the professors and politicos are outside of the rigging?

"I have to admit that while my politics generally tend to the liberal option, on this one issue of chipmunks, I can see the NRA point of view."

"Part of me wants these suckers to die."

Says Mayor Citizen Dave. Also: "I love tomatoes enough to rethink my concerns about global climate change."

Self-interest. It's baked in. 

"I would take a Johnsonville brat from the hand of a Koch brother if it were offered with the proper condiments and a good beer."

Citizen Dave explains Wisconsin values.

IN THE COMMENTS: The Farmer said: "Bravo, ex-Mayor Dave! And MadisonMan said: "Yes, Bravo -- except for the no ketchup part, you heathen!!!!" Original Mike said: "Ketchup on a brat??? MM, you're kidding, right?" Mr. D said: "Mayor Dave is right. No ketchup on a brat." And David-2 said:

MM - meet DH!

"Look, if it helps, I'll take my share of the blame for last year's mess."

"I'm not sure if the bad stuff would have happened if it hadn't been for the transition between myself and the incoming mayor. Paul Soglin was legitimately focused on other more demanding issues and I was busy looking for more bubble wrap and packing boxes."

Whoa! Mayor Dave takes the blame... and shifts it.

"As his guy Scott Walker might say, while the rest of us were in church on Sunday, that's what Meade was up to."

The forum administrator over at Isthmus — "jjoyce" — starts a thread called "Meade being Meade," which (so far) mostly appears to be an attempt to defend the Isthmus's last-blogger-standing, Citizen Dave (who was once Madison's Mayor Dave (Cieslewicz)), who strains to crank out enough prose to suffice as the only blogger left . (They kicked out the brilliant but conservative David Blaska after a couple liberal bloggers left.)

Meade tends to comment — often as the only commenter — on Mayor Citizen Dave's blog — e.g., here — and Dave never responds. I guess he needs to crank out the next blog post so that whole blogging thing can appear to continue to be something that keeps happening at Isthmus, but as a result, you've got these belabored columns blog posts about some damned thing like Mayor Citizen Dave losing his luggage and then there'll be one comment, and it's Meade. Like Meade is the last word on everything Dave ever says.

Why doesn't anyone over there — e.g. Dave or Dave's presumably at least slightly numerous readers — pick up the thread? Why does the conversation go nowhere? Even jjoyce won't go there. He's got to start a separate thread in the forum to discuss the Problem of Meade. It's like Dave's is the lunch table no one will sit at.

"Back in business — Blaska!"

Announces Meade, telling Isthmus readers to bookmark the new blog, but it's Isthmus, so Meade's immediately smacked down by one commenter who assures everyone that Meade "will be dropping [Blaska's] opinions on [the Isthmus forum] like they are science at every opportunity, so I don't feel the need to bookmark his page." And then everyone switches to talking about some other blogger on the same site, and she's apparently a complete idiot.

Blaska was the conservative blogger at Isthmus not too long ago. But Isthmus lost a couple of its liberal bloggers left — Jack Craver (remember when he trashed me?) and Emily Mills (remember when she trashed me?) — and if they'd kept Blaska, there'd only have been one liberal (Citizen Dave) to offset the one conservative, and that wouldn't make sense in a Madison, Wisconsin "alternative" newspaper now, would it?

Shouldn't Democrats have had a viable candidate lined up before they went to all the trouble to get a million signatures on those Recall Walker petitions?

This list of 11 potential candidates is horrifying — or hilarious, depending on how much you like Governor Scott Walker. I mean, Citizen Dave has the 11 in order, and #1 is Herb Kohl! Herb Kohl is a 76-year-old man who's retiring from the U.S. Senate after a quarter century (and very little to show for it). According to Dave, the great thing about Kohl is that he's very rich, so he can use his own money. Note the implied concession: People aren't going to want to make contributions to the other candidates. But, look, there are no donation limits in the recall election. If Kohl wants to dump his money into the election, he can hand it to whomever he wants.Maybe one of the other 10 characters on Dave's list. Maybe #6, Kathleen Falk, who is, you know, the only person on the list who's actually announced her/his candidacy.

ADDED: Here's the Government Accountability Boards memo about contributions for recall expenses. The exemption applies to money used "for the purpose of payment of legal fees and other expenses incurred in connection with the circulation, offer to file or filing, or with the response to the circulation, offer to file or filing, of a petition to recall an officer prior to the time a recall primary or election is ordered, or after that time if incurred in contesting or defending the order."