Some suggestions, in no particular order, of a list that’s only a sketch:

Recognize the truth of the city, and all cities. This small town is filled with thousands upon thousands of smart, knowledgeable people. I don’t say this to make others feel good; I say it because it’s true.

These many don’t need the management, guidance, and approval of city officials to do good things – they’ll do more good on their own than when under a bureaucrat’s thumb. It’s arrogance or ignorance to think otherwise.

Regulate less. We should stop telling people what to do, with what they’ve earned, and with what they’d like to build. Officials aren’t more knowledgeable than those taking these risks, and they’re not the ones taking these risks.

Stop leading with regulations. If the city must regulate, and to some small degree it must, it should avoid leading with news of regulations. A litany of warnings about where one must not park, where trucks may not go, what fines residents may incur, how quiet one must be, should not be the introduction to life here.

Don’t lead with regulations; lead with rights and opportunities. Emphasize what’s allowed and possible, not what’s prohibited.

Smart, successful people will not relocate to a place where hectoring mediocrities badger residents day and night about the importance of coloring within the lines.

Address the danger of vacancies and emptiness. Other than a brothel, nothing is worse for a business district than empty storefronts, abandoned factories, and vacant lots.

‘Nothing’ is far worse than ‘something.’

Just as customers recoil from stores with half-empty shelves, so do new businesses shy from broken-down, empty city blocks.

Success builds success; abundance creates abundance. Both success and abundance come from an initial position of the liberty to use one’s talents to their fullest.

Be candid about problems. Americans admire politicians who acknowledge their mistakes. A child’s excuses are no substitute for candid admission of municipal errors. No one outside of a small collection of back-patters believes these rationalizations anyway.

Tackle real problems in big ways. Whitewater has chronic and spreading poverty among children. Divert future spending from empty projects to local anti-poverty initiatives. Spending in the city should be on public safety and care for the needy and vulnerable — not a dozen other projects and schemes.

Working on a project like this won’t tarnish Whitewater’s image – it will enhance our image as a compassionate and honest city that cares about all its people.

Stop exaggerating. The best way to improve the city’s reputation is to do the right things, not simply to insist that everything looks good, and is wonderful, in a supposedly micropolitan dreamtown.

It’s a bad habit, both embarrassing and borne of weakness.

Sound principles and good policies are the best marketing. The easiest way to advertise, brand, market, or represent something is to have something good to advertise, brand, market, or represent. It’s not what officials say, but what people actually see, that’s believable.

Encourage individuality.

Embrace and advertise the beauty of our multi-ethnic city. One of our greatest strengths is that we are a multi-ethnic city. Proudly declare as much – that we are a place for all people.

There is no general, better, more humane arrangement for our city than one of free markets in capital, goods, and labor. To argue otherwise is no more reasonable than to argue against a natural law of gravity.

We should welcome people of all kinds, from all places, to live here.

Embrace an American heritage of individual liberty, limited government, free markets, and tolerance. Forget about advancing some silly, reactionary vision of Whitewater in opposition to the grand and beautiful vision America offers all people.

American principles are better than a false, stodgy local exceptionalism.

Stop deriding students as though they were Visigoths. Without the university, Whitewater would be tumbleweeds from one end of town to the other.

The university has had many fine accomplishments that are commendable; the day-to-day presence of so many people living here is no less to our good fortune.

Consider the best order a spontaneous order. What people build on their own, working together privately and without a central authority, is more creative and valuable than a bureacrat’s scheme.

Strive to meet true national standards. Stop pretending about national and international awards for city projects, awards that are utterly worthless, when there are teams and athletes in the city — and so many other people — who have actually won national championships and true honors.

Allow people to experiment. New businesses, new art, new music, new and genuine innovations– they won’t come under government’s shadow, but free of that influence.

The best ideas will be those we’ve not yet considered.

2011 was a bad year for press freedoms:

“Crackdown was the word of the year in 2011. Never has freedom of information been so closely associated with democracy. Never have journalists, through their reporting, vexed the enemies of freedom so much. Never have acts of censorship and physical attacks on journalists seemed so numerous. The equation is simple: the absence or suppression of civil liberties leads necessarily to the suppression of media freedom. Dictatorships fear and ban information, especially when it may undermine them.

See the full, world index at Press Freedom Index 2011-2012 – Reporters Without Borders.

Ten-year-old tabby vs. airline.

Good morning.

Whitewater will see increasing clouds with a high of thirty-five today; Orlando, tourist spot in the next GOP primary state, will have chance of showers, with a high of seventy-seven.

On this day in 1967, NASA experienced a tragedy, but one she was able to overcome: “Astronauts Virgil I. ”Gus” Grissom, Edward H. White and Roger B. Chaffee died in a flash fire during a test aboard their Apollo I spacecraft at Cape Kennedy, Fla.”

Google’s daily puzzle asks for a the name of a creature: “What beast is fought by the man who shines brightly with Alnilam, Alnitak, and Mintaka?”

I see that the Whitewater Schools now have a bring-your own device (BYOD) policy. This is the right decision, allowing students to use the many useful, advanced devices available to students across America. Tablets, laptops, handhelds: facility in their use — and simple enjoyment of them — is now part of a proper schooling.

The full details of the policy are available online Here’s the introduction:

Students who choose to bring in their own Internet-capable devices to Whitewater Unified School District will have access to the District wireless system. This document may answer some of the questions the community may have about this opportunity for students.

In continuing our efforts to provide more access for students, we will be allowing students to bring their own wireless mobile learning device beginning on January 24, 2012. This will allow for students to access our secure network with their own device within the school day through a common portal. This includes personal laptops, smart phones, portable storage media, and other handheld devices.

It was a lifetime ago, when I was the age of those now in our schools, that my father saw that I had the cutting-edge devices of that now-distant time. I had a proper calculator (HP), and for a class that required a slide rule, a precision one from what was then West Germany. He loved his son, so dearly as parents today love their children, and so offered every possible advantage.

It’s right to allow others to do as much for this new generation as devoted parents once did for us.

Well done.

Consider how profligate the State of Wisconsin is with public money.

Millions spent on a business relocation for a corporation that (1) withheld its identity, (2) was already in Wisconsin, (3) used flimsy worries about protests at the Capitol as way to curry favor with the Walker Administration, (4) where the head of the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation now admits that the Wisconsin business’s move within Wisconsin was something he did not discuss with them.

See, from Bill Lueders at WisconsinWatch.org, Spectrum Deal had stealth component.

How do we know this now? Not because officials admitted it on their own — they’ve been forced to acknowledge this fiasco only after WTDY submitted a public records request for email confirming these facts.

Millions from the state, but how much did the head of the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation (formerly Wisconsin Dept. of Commerce) know about Spectrum Brands’ (Rayovac’s) move from Madison to neighboring Middleton with state funding?

He contends he knew only what he read after the move was announced:

Paul Jadin, CEO of the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp., which awarded the $4 million incentive, said in an interview Tuesday that he first learned of Spectrum’s plan to relocate to Middleton from the company’s announcement. This move was “not a part of our dialogue.”

The whole WisconsinWatch.org story is compelling, as Lueders shows how easily manipulated — how willing to be manipulated — public officials are.

Jadin, by the way, spoke locally at the dedication of Whitewater’s multi-million-dollar public boondoggle, the Innovation Center.

How very fitting — a local public project that used millions in public grants and debt to offer cushy new digs for existing public employees could have no better commemorator than Jadin, who either truly didn’t know to what ends millions of state dollars went, or is lying about it now.

The next time Whitewater’s city manager, having made an utter hash of ‘community development’ while acting as director of Whitewater’s CDA, tells people how proud he is to get money from Jadin’s WEDC, he might be reminded how wasteful and ill-advised those financial awards are. (See, along these lines, The Cost and Camouflage of Grants.)

I’ve posted before about a new poll, from pollster Charles Franklin, now visiting at Marquette (from UW-Madison).

Link to poll: Walker and Obama have single digit leads in Marquette Law School Poll and results & data (instrument, methodology, and full topline results).

Franklin’s a serious pollster and political scientist, and he’s one of the founders of a polling site now nesting at the Huffington Post
(http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/pollster).

His first poll in this series is odd, though. Both Walker and Obama have small leads against possible challengers. Over at the Journal Sentinel, Craig Gilbert — easily Wisconsin’s best reporter on polls and polling — isn’t sure what to make of it:

Until now, Gov. Scott Walker has had a negative or neutral job rating in every nonpartisan public poll since he took office.

But a new Marquette Law School survey breaks that pattern.
Walker’s approval rating is slightly higher (51%) than his disapproval rating (46%). Slightly more people think the state is going in the right direction (50%) than the wrong direction (46%). And Walker has single-digit leads over his closest Democratic challengers in hypothetical recall matchups.

These numbers could partly reflect the impact of millions of dollars in pro-Walker ads since mid-November. But we’ll have to wait for more polls to be done to know whether the governor’s standing is truly ticking up in Wisconsin or whether this survey represents a blip.

In his story on the new poll, Gilbert quotes Prof. Franklin:

“This is the beginning of the election year, not the end,” says Franklin. “These incumbents (Obama and Walker) come in with advantages. In a sense, they both come in with the same advantage. Their opposition is not yet set.”

Franklin has a possible explanation — that without opponents, both incumbents do better than they otherwise might — but it’s not the only one. An alternative explanation is that this first poll in the series is an outlier, and other polls will find harder going in Wisconsin for both Walker and Obama.

Franklin talks about this as the beginning of the election year, but the same may be said of his polls.

The Left disputes the findings in the poll, contending that Franklin has underrepresented unions, Democrats, and over-represented conservatives.

Looking at Franklin’s methodology, one sees that the margins of error here are large — only one of the match-ups against Walker is outside the margin of error. Rather than 3.5-4% margins for the head-to-head matchups, the Marquette poll has margins of approx. 7.1%.

At the same time, the weighting — from actual respondents to expected distribution within the state — is often odd, and unexpected: male-female, and Republican, Democrat, & independent distributions dubiously alter prevalence from an expected proportion in the population. Franklin drops independents down to 8.5%, down from a Gallup estimate of 15%, and the Gallup findings are even farther from his unweighted distribution of only 7.6%.

Still, Craig Gilbert correctly finds in the Marquette poll confirmation of what’s almost certain, regardless of polls — most voters have decided opinions:

The fact that [State Sen. Tim] Cullen gets 40% against Walker even though only 18% know enough to have an opinion about him reflects the fact that most voters are locked in no matter who the Democratic candidate is.

This first Marquette poll is in need of corroboration. It may be right, but considering polls that have come before it, and the unexpected weighting, there’s reason to be cautious and skeptical.

Few images look worse than an angry person who points at someone during a confrontation. Better to keep one’s hands at one’s side, or in one’s pockets if the temptation to gesture is too strong.

This is especially true when the woman pointing is poorly dressed, with unfashionable, loud clothing, poor makeup over leathery skin, and a hair color that cannot possibly be natural to her.

It’s worse when the object of her ire is a phlegmatic politician who knows how to goad her without gesturing at all.

Admittedly, Gov. Brewer of Arizona isn’t a national political candidate, as Pres. Obama has been for years. Still, she might have more sense than to be photographed in a way that only shows Obama to his advantage.

Good morning.

It’s a mostly cloudy day with a high temperature of thirty-five for Whitewater. In Central Park, it’s a rainy day ahead with a high temperature of forty-two.

The Wisconsin Historical Society recalls that on this day in 1925

Fire Destroys Whitewater Hospital

On this date a fire destroyed the Whitewater Hospital. Monetary losses were estimated at $20,000, but no deaths were reported. [Source: Janesville Gazette]

In the fall, NASA launched an Earth-observing satellite, Suomi NPP. Here’s their description of the satellite:

The Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (Suomi NPP) mission represents a critical first step in building the next-generation Earth-observing satellite system that will collect data on both long-term climate change and short-term weather conditions.

Suomi NPP will extend and improve upon the Earth system data records established by NASA’s Earth Observing System (EOS) fleet of satellites that have provided critical insights into the dynamics of the entire Earth system: clouds, oceans, vegetation, ice, solid Earth and atmosphere.

The Suomi NPP spacecraft lifted off aboard a United Launch Alliance Delta II rocket from Space Launch Complex 2 at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California on Oct. 28, 2011 at 5:48 a.m. EDT.

The satellite has its own flickr gallery of astonishing images.

Google’s puzzle for today is one of notation and codes: “1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 e6 3.g3 d5 4.Bg2 dxc4 5.Nf3 Be7. What is the ECO code of this opening?”

Live from the San Diego Zoo, it’s a condor cam.

Here’s the SD Zoo’s description of what’s waiting online:

You Are Watching. . .

… Sisquoc and Shatash take turns sitting in their nest incubating an egg! Because every California condor egg is so important, their real egg has been removed for now to an incubator under the close watch of the keepers, while the parents take care of a life-like artificial egg. During the last few days of incubation, the real, fertile egg will be returned, and the parents will begin raising the chick. That’s expected to happen in March!

Via SDZ Global Wildlife Conservancy – Video – Condor Cam.

The first of Charles Franklin’s polls while visiting at Marquette is now available online : Walker and Obama have single digit leads in Marquette Law School Poll.

I’ll review the poll tonight, and post more tomorrow. The results are — at first glance — more disparate (and almost conflicting) than one might have expected, but these January results that show both Pres. Obama and Gov. Walker ahead in their respective races are not irreconcilable.

One point for now: Marquette’s published the results & data (instrument, methodology, and full topline results).

Blogger-lawyer Ed Garvey’s professed worry that these results would be leaked to Gov. Walker was, as I wrote yesterday, an incredible contention. Unless one defines publishing results for all the world as to see leaking them to Team Walker, there was never reason to believe that Franklin was a secret, polling-benefactor of the Walker Administration.

There’s also no need for Garvey to worry about public records access (public UW-Madison v. private Marquette) when private Marquette publishes comprehensive results.

Would it be right to shoot a Sasquatch, if one found that long-sought-after creature? Over at Live Science, they ask if shooting one might be a necessary, definitive way to determine if Big Foot exists:

But even the highest-quality photograph or video can’t be considered definitive proof of Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, or any other mythical beast. Similarly, if the goal is to simply make scientists and the general public take Bigfoot seriously, then some verified remains of the creature – be they hair, teeth, blood, bones or something else – would do the trick. [Infamous 'Yeti Finger' Flunks DNA Test]

But definitive proof is a very high standard. Most Bigfoot enthusiasts — and the general public — would be satisfied with nothing less than the rock-solid definitive proof offered by a living or dead specimen.

One might be hoping for the recovery of a previously-dead Sasquatch, but Live Science and others must know that the best way to get remains is to blast a Big Foot into easily-collectible, still-recognizable pieces.

I’d say no: assuming there is such an animal, it’s terribly rare, and should not be hunted. Captured alive, recovered previously-dead, captured on film, or not captured at all – those would be my preferred options.

Captured alive would offer more opportunities for science than recovered dead, and it would be more profitable, too. People would pay to see a dead Sasquatch, but they’d pay big money to see a live one. If one could keep it alive, and avoid any unfortunate, King Kong-like escape scenarios, both science and the economy would benefit from a live capture.

(H/t to Hot Air for the story.)

Boston Bruins goalie Tim Thomas declined to attend a White House meeting with Pres. Obama after the Bruins won the Stanley Cup. Thomas wrote about his decision on his Facebook page, as the Chicago Tribune reports.

Perhaps it’s because he’s a libertarian, but more likely, he’s a Tea Party member. (If he were on the far Left, he might as easily have declined the invitation, too, for different reasons.)

No matter: the world won’t fall apart, and declarations of this kind would be less attention-getting if they were more routine. The Dixie Chicks took all sorts of criticism for their criticism of Pres. Bush, but the world went on. (It hasn’t gone on entirely well, but it has gone on.)

A successful athlete makes his statement, the rest of the team shows up, the incumbent president delivers his remarks at the event, and no one is harmed in the process.

As it should be, more often, on more issues, with more politicians.

Good morning.

In Whitewater, it’s a mostly cloudy day ahead, with a high of thirty-three. In Madison, site of Gov. Walker’s 7 PM State of the State address, there will be a slight chance of flurries with a high of thirty-two.

At WisconinEye’s website, there will be a webcast of the speech, followed by the Democrats’ response, and thereafter political discussion and interviews with state legislators.

NASA recorded the Sun’s recent, large flare, and posted the video with an accompanying explanation:

The sun erupted late on January 22, 2012 with an M8.7 class flare, an earth-directed coronal mass ejection (CME), and a burst of fast moving, highly energetic protons known as a “solar energetic particle” event. The latter has caused the strongest solar radiation storm since September 2005 according to NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center.

NASA’s Goddard Space Weather Center’s models predict that the CME is moving at almost 1,400 miles per second, and could reach Earth’s magnetosphere — the magnetic envelope that surrounds Earth — as early as tomorrow, Jan 24 at 9 AM ET (plus or minus 7 hours). This has the potential to provide good auroral displays, possibly at lower latitudes than normal.

Google’s daily puzzle asks for a name not of a famous man, but about his famous student: “I was arrested by the Inquisition in 1633 and then pardoned by the Catholic Church in 1992. One of my students had my story written in stone scrolls at his castle. What was my student’s name?”

Over at Cato, they will be live blogging the speeches from the president and the GOP.

Blogging begins at 8 PM CT, @ Live Blog of the 2012 State of the Union Address and the GOP Response.

Embedded below are screenshots of the Drudge Report and Huffington Post, and from them one can see different views on Mitt Romney.

Matt Drudge is a Romney supporter, and on his site, the highlight is Newt Gingrich’s failure to excite a Florida debate audience. Down below, in the lower left, Drudge links to news of Romney’s income and tax returns. For one of Romney’s opponents, a main story; for information that may damage Romney, it’s a small link in the corner.

Drudge will highlight other Republicans to the extent that doing so divides opposition to Romney, or simply zings Obama, but not often otherwise.

(By the way, I don’t think there’s anything substantively wrong with Romney’s income, but that’s not the same as considering the political impact — how others will demagogue — that money. On the merits, see Bain’s Not Romney’s Weakness, It’s His Strength.)

Over at the Huffington Post, the story’s all about how wealthy Romney is, albeit with some mention of his significant charitable contributions. He’s not even an American — it’s Swiss Mitt.

I still think Romney will be the GOP nominee; if he should not be, one would have to reassess the fall elections, as another GOP nominee from this field would be a decided underdog.

Good morning.

For Whitewater, it’s a day of gradual clearing with a high of twenty-six. For Washington, awaiting Pres. Obama’s State of the Union address at 8 PM CT, it’s a mostly sunny day with a high of fifty-five. The White House website will stream an enhanced broadcast of the address, with charts and supporting documentation.

In Whitewater, the Urban Forestry commission meets at 4:15 PM, and the Community Development Authority at 5 PM.

The Wisconsin Historical Society recalls that on this day in 1960, rural residents confronted a

Crisis of Morals in Green County

On this date representatives of civic and service organizations, schools and churches met in Monroe to discuss the “crisis of morals” in Green County, where the number of unwed mothers increased to 40 in 1959. [Source: Janesville Gazette]

After a quick look a map, I can see that Green County’s still shown, so my best guess would be that residents came through all this well enough.

Just in time for elections in America, scientists abroad have a model for detecting election fraud. Rachel Ehrenberg of Science News reports that

The researchers examined voter turnout and votes received by the winning party for recent parliamentary elections in Russia, Austria, Finland, Switzerland and the United Kingdom and for presidential elections in Uganda and the United States. Graphing the relationship between turnout and votes for the winner revealed unusual peaks in the data for the elections in Russia and Uganda — a signature of funny business, the scientists contend.

Ballot stuffing best explains the data, says study coauthor Peter Klimek, a complex systems scientist at the Medical University of Vienna.

“Of course, this is a statistical detection technique, not conclusive proof,” says Klimek, who, along with Stefan Thurner and other University of Vienna colleagues, reported the analysis online January 15 at arXiv.org. But the numbers need explaining, “and nothing explains them as cleanly as the fraud hypothesis,” Klimek says.

Thousands of precincts in Russia and districts in Uganda reported 100 percent voter turnout with 100 percent of those votes for the winning party, the researchers found. Graph these data various ways and the fraud signature pops out, notes Klimek. Plotting votes for the winner against voter turnout, for example, reveals a line that slopes off into a plateau for most countries, but for Russia and Uganda those lines keep climbing right off the graph.

Google’s puzzle for today is an historical one: “If you were being served terrapin stew at a historic presidential inaugural ball, in what government building would you be?”

For your own dish, consider a recipe for Chesapeake Terrapin Stew from reciperascal.com.

It’s a cruel game to defend government spending on the well-fed with the lament that spending cuts must be stopped, lest the poor and vulnerable suffer.

The poor and vulnerable will not suffer in a society that reduces spending on corporate welfare, sham job-creation programs, so-called business-development grants, and spending on weapons so expensive and impractical that the military can afford to build only a few (and dare not risk a one).

These are not programs for the poor — they’re programs for well-connected friends, favored businesses, and influential military contractors.

The politicians who feed friends on the slop of Big Government care about the vulnerable simply as a talking point, a defense of other business as usual.

The national Libertarian Party highlights this selfish tactic in this week’s message (“Libertarians propose rolling back the most-needed services last – after getting government out of the way so that voluntary solutions can take their place.”)

(For more about how libertarians will support transitional spending for the vulnerable and destitute, see On Poverty Spending)

Charles Franklin, a UW-Madison professor and pollster is now visiting at Marquette. He’ll be conducting polls on Wisconsin politics (recall, other topics) while a visiting professor.

Embedded below is a brief interview of Franklin, conducted last week.

Writing at Fighting Bob, in a post entitled “Open records open minds,” blogger-lawyer Ed Garvey wonders if Franklin’s visiting professorship at Marquette will allow Franklin to leak polling data to Team Walker. Garvey thinks that, if Franklin were at UW-Madison (or on sabbatical from UW-Madison), then his polling data would be subject to an open records request (as it would not be at private Marquette):

….if he [Franklin] is on sabbatical and is being paid by UW I would argue that his polling information is a public record. Possibly he came to the same conclusion so someone switched it from sabbatical to visiting professor. I wonder who is paying him? I don’t know, but will ask and report to you. Wisconsin voters should have all the information they can get. Time for Marquette to open the books.

Garvey’s argument is unpersuasive. There’s no evidence that Franklin will leak any data to the Walker campaign. Second, much of Franklin’s polling data will be — as is common with many polls — publicly available, anyway. Garvey’s argument really assumes that (1) Franklin would publish results without underlying data on survey size, etc., or (2) would conceal from the public some questions entirely (passing that information along to Gov. Walker’s campaign). The first would reduce the poll’s credibility, and the second would be difficult for anyone at a large university — public or private — to conceal. I’ve no reason to think Franklin is so inclined.

Even for polling from the public UW-Madison, one can guess UW-Madison would argue that the law should recognize that some social science data were exempt from the Public Records Law (Wis. Stat. 19.31-19.39). At the very least, a university would be sure to object to records-access while data collection was ongoing, and during analysis. To do otherwise would be to leave academics’ research exposed before a study concluded.

Since timeliness matters so greatly for campaign polling, public-records access to data after an election would have historical value, but would come too late to alleviate someone’s immediate (unsupported) concerns about an election advantage for Team Walker.

In any event, Franklin will only be one of several pollsters (beyond the campaigns) surveying Wisconsinites closely this year.