The Whitewater School Board meeting for Monday night was technically perfect – an agenda of more than a dozen items, dispatched in little over forty minutes. I know that summer days are long and hot, but I cannot avoid observing that there was a perfunctory quality to it all. We can list any number of…

I contended in Part 1 that conventionality takes hold quickly in s public body, in the absence of choice and the competition that it creates. That’s why I have contended before that ideology matters little, after a while: politics devolves from principled ideology into self-interested incumbency. Liberal, conservative, moderate – long-term incumbents all start to…

I posted previously on Andrew Coulson’s observation that public education costs more nationally than ever, but produces a result no better than decades ago. How did the world’s richest nation, with so many sharp people, wind up in this predicament? We abandoned the opportunities for choice in education. Choice produces competition between objects from which…

The Janesville Gazette has a troubling story on the decline in payrolls, by 3.1% over the last year, in Janesville. Smaller Whitewater (less than one quarter the size of Janesville) will feel the influence of economic hardship in its larger neighbor. The link to the Gazette story is at http://www.gazettextra.com/weblogs/latest-news/2008/jul/30/janesville-area-among-nations-worst-job-losses/

Over at the fine group blog the Volokh Conspiracy, Ilya Somin posts in reply to an article in Dissent that contends Hayek is no longer relevant. Hayek remains relevant, as Somin notes, not only for a critique of socialism, but for his critique of the anti-growth, anti-change right, too. The excellent post may be found…

NASA is fifty years old today, but it is not a happy anniversary. NASA’s human exploration program is uninspiring, and her next-generation spacecraft is behind schedule already. America has changed much in the last fifty years, and the high-tech cachet of NASA has passed to dozens of private American companies. Google, for example, is commemorating…

The modern trend toward the familiar use of a first name and the grandiose description of municipal officials as visionaries combines to produce unintentionally funny results. An example is when a member of our Common Council, without irony, can describe our city manager’s plan for Whitewater, Wisconsin as the “…vision of Kevin.” The combination of…

When an official attacks the lawful speech rights of a citizen, he opposes his self-interest, in career, in an inflated view of himself, or whatever limited need, against the very liberty of a fellow citizen. He rationalizes – usually in the most feeble, embarrassing way – that his needs are the needs of all the…

Readers to Free Whitewater know that officials in Whitewater, WI conducted a months-long search to learn the identity of an anonymous blogger, only to confront the wrong man! When apparently thin-skinned officials in Memphis try to overcome the Constitutional right of anonymous free speech, they should and must be required to provide a compelling reason.…

A noted Memphis blogger, and a resident of Whitewater, both alerted me to official transgressions against First Amendment rights in Memphis, TN. Another Memphis blogger, an anonymous critic of police leadership failures in Memphis, is facing a lawsuit from the city and its police director, designed to force an ISP to divulge his or her…

Much has been made of LP presidential nominee Bob Barr’s focus on criticism of Senator McCain as a way to attract otherwise Republican voters. (McCain’s likely judicial picks are just one source of complaint.) It’s a backwards tactic – if Barr wants to attract voters on the right, he needs to show that he can…

We have a city website and city newsletter, a news and sports website that often reproduces city announcements, and a weekly local newspaper that does the same. (The Royal Purple showed only slight inquisitiveness under its outgoing staff.) There is seldom any background, any description of how people actually conduct themselves, from these media. Solid…

I am not sure how many people watch public meetings on our cable access channel (Station 13), but the number is sure to be smaller after the cable provider moves the station to a different channel. (This was a decision of the cable company and not our local station.) Fewer viewers overall will surely mean…

Months ago, I wrote about former Gov. Schaefer of Maryland, who disgraced himself and his state by trying to intimidate lawful political protesters. I asked if something like that could happen in Whitewater, knowing at the time that is was possible. Sure enough, officials in Whitewater went down that path. What’s happened in Maryland, though,…