The Whitewater-Area League of Women Voters’ May 2010 Newsletter is now available, and the latest issue includes a calendar of upcoming LWV events. The latest copy of the LWV newsletter is available as a link on my blogroll, and is embedded below, with coding through Google.
Upcoming for the Whitewater-Area League is an annual meeting —
Date: May 22nd (Saturday)
Event: LWV Annual Meeting
Where: Fairhaven, Fellowship Hall 10AM
Here’s the Friday open comments post, following reader responses to a recent poll.
The use of pseudonyms and anonymous postings will be fine.
Although the template has a space for a name, email address, and website, those who want to leave a field blank can do so. Comments will be moderated, against profanity or trolls. Otherwise, have at it.
I’ll keep the post open through Sunday afternoon.
For this week, some suggestions for topics — Whitewater’s possible residential overlay, and a newer, larger Walmart. I’ll post on both topics throughout the weekend.
Quick summaries of my views:
Walmart — fine, and a competitive benefit to the city, so long as neither unusual concessions nor unusual burdens on them. So far, so good.
Overlay for the Starin Park neighborhood — I’m opposed.
Good morning,
The forecast calls for a mostly sunny day, with a high of sixty-five degrees.
Far as I know, there are no municipal, public meetings for the City of Whitewater today. The weekend starts on a sweet note.
Today, it’s Laps for Lakeview at Lakeview School. At the Middle School, there’s an 8th grade Reality Fair in the gym.
On this day in 1804, Lewis and Clark departed to explore the Northwest, as the History Channel recalls:
One year after the United States doubled its territory with the Louisiana Purchase, the Lewis and Clark expedition leaves St. Louis, Missouri, on a mission to explore the Northwest from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean.
Even before the U.S. government concluded purchase negotiations with France, President Thomas Jefferson commissioned his private secretary Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, an army captain, to lead an expedition into what is now the U.S. Northwest. On May 14, the “Corps of Discovery”–featuring approximately 45 men (although only an approximate 33 men would make the full journey)–left St. Louis for the American interior.
The expedition traveled up the Missouri River in a 55-foot long keelboat and two smaller boats. In November, Toussaint Charbonneau, a French-Canadian fur trader accompanied by his young Native American wife Sacagawea, joined the expedition as an interpreter. The group wintered in present-day North Dakota before crossing into present-day Montana, where they first saw the Rocky Mountains. On the other side of the Continental Divide, they were met by Sacagawea’s tribe, the Shoshone Indians, who sold them horses for their journey down through the Bitterroot Mountains. After passing through the dangerous rapids of the Clearwater and Snake rivers in canoes, the explorers reached the calm of the Columbia River, which led them to the sea. On November 8, 1805, the expedition arrived at the Pacific Ocean, the first European explorers to do so by an overland route from the east. After pausing there for the winter, the explorers began their long journey back to St. Louis.
On September 23, 1806, after almost two and a half years, the expedition returned to the city, bringing back a wealth of information about the largely unexplored region, as well as valuable U.S. claims to Oregon Territory.
A Tennessee woman was charged with forcing her young son, aged five, to smoke a cigarette to teach him a lesson on – wait for it – not smoking.
Bad idea under any circumstances, but especially when the mother had marijuana in her car.
I’ve posted twice before about the disordered policy of John Chianelli, who runs Milwaukee County’s Mental Health Complex (The MHC is now named the Behavioral Health Division, and those writing about this issue may use one term or the other.)
Chianelli implemented the policy of mixing female mental patients with potentially violent male patients, on the perverse theory that the presence of women would work a trade-off between male on male violence for male on female sexual assault. See, A Milwaukee County Bureaucrat’s Immoral Utilitarianism and Update: A Milwaukee County Bureaucrat’s Immoral Utilitarianism.
There’s yet more to this story….
Persistent Patient Fears. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports, in a story entitled, Advocates seek reform at County Mental Health Complex that
Former patients of the county’s psychiatric hospital often greatly fear the possibility of a return stay because of a hostile and sometimes unsafe atmosphere, said Melissa Butts, who coordinates the complex’s Office of Consumer Affairs.
“All we want is the suffering to stop,” Butts said. She works for Our Space Inc., which runs the office under contract with the county.
She spoke at a Milwaukee Commission on Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault subcommittee, which discussed fallout from a federal investigation into sexual assault of patients by other patients at the complex.
The federal Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services in January found multiple reports of assaults and threatened to cut off the county psychiatric hospital’s federal funding. The threat was lifted in April after corrective measures were taken, including staff retraining and better patient monitoring.
Abuse victims and advocates should urge county officials to consider major changes in the way mental health services are offered, said Barbara Beckert, manager of the Milwaukee office of Disability Rights Wisconsin. The group, designated under state law to protect patient rights, is conducting its own investigation of the complex.
Understandably, as the Journal Sentinel reports, patient advocates would prefer that this issue be kept from politics. Readers will note I have emphasized principally Chianelli’s policy, rather than that of Milwaukee County Executive Scott Walker. Chianelli should and must go; Walker should consider what it means to allow Chianelli to stay. The imperative rests with removing Chianelli, as a part of a reform effort.
Nevertheless, incumbent county executive and gubernatorial candidate Walker’s prompt defense of Chianelli’s policies was sadly predictable, presumptuous, and tainted of politics.
Chianelli’s Dodgy Scholarship? Curiously, a psychologist’s preliminary review of literature supporting the practice of trading male-on-male violence for male-on-female violence apparently finds…no scholastic corroboration. From a post entitled, When Violence Strikes on a Psychiatric Ward, John M Grohol, PsyD writes that
Taking John Chianelli at his word, I went and combed through the research literature to see where I might find data to support his hypothesis that men in an inpatient setting would be less violent if housed with women. After spending about an hour and putting more than a dozen different queries into PsycINFO, a common research database, I couldn’t come up with anything (In contrast, usually it takes me about 5 minutes to find a citation I need to support a hypothesis I’m interested in).
What the research does show is that ward crowding leads to higher incidents of violence. It’s not clear if ward crowding is just the lack of physical space in such a facility, or also the lack of ‘psychological space’ ? that is, privacy.
Now, certainly Mr. Chianelli is entitled to his opinion. But unless he has some scientific data to back up his hypothesis, he should not be experimenting on human subjects in this manner. I’m certain Mr. Chianelli’s ego can take the hit in consideration of putting his patients’ safety concerns first.
Patients aren’t guinea pigs. If your patients are suffering from sexual or violent assault at the hands of your other patients, it’s human management 101 to separate out the two groups until you’ve gotten the situation under control.
It’s a sad situation in Milwaukee County and I hope the County Board gets a handle on this important public mental health issue sooner rather than later. Why put patients in harm’s way when an easy solution [separation by gender] is readily available?
Note also that Chris Liebenthal of Cognitive Dissidence
has two thorough posts on the mismanagement and perverse policy imposed on vulnerable mental patients. The first, Walker Could Have Avoided BHD Problems Three Years Ago summaries the practical and political environment nicely: “But even more important than Chianelli’s future with the County is that Scott Walker needs to be held accountable for again putting his political aspirations before the best interests of the county that he is supposed to be leading.”
Liebenthal has a longer, and detailed, account entitled, BHD Problems Could Have Been Avoided Three Years Ago. Here’s just a portion of it:
But then Dr. Wiedel [Chief Psychologist and Director of Legal Services at BHD from 1999 to 2008] told me something I [Liebenthal] was not been previously aware of.
In 2007, in response to the increasing number of incidents of physical aggression, Dr. Wiedel took it upon himself to design and write up a full proposal for a secure unit to deal with the more aggressive patients that they had been dealing with.
The proposal made it through the various levels of bureaucracy until it actually made it to Scott Walker’s desk for his consideration for the 2008 budget. Unfortunately, Walker chose to reject the proposal, which would have prevented the horrific events that are currently being played out.
Dr. Wiedel told me that in January 2008, he learned from Chianelli that Walker rejected the plan, in part, due to Chianelli speaking against the plan. A couple of months after this, BHD was cited by the state for having too many incidents of physical aggression, making the citations this year the second time in three years that the security and staffing at BHD was found to be inadequate.
I would urge readers to visit Milwaukee First and read Liebenthal’s entire post, linked above.
Reaction. I have no preference among the three major candidates running for governor this year. Of them, Scott Walker defends Chianelli’s policy, Tom Barrett opposes it, and Mark Neumann doesn’t want to comment. Too funny, though, are Neumann’s remarks about not commenting (as the Journal Sentinel story I’ve cited above reports those remarks):
I prefer not to take another opportunity to say something negative about my opponent,” Neumann said at a campaign stop in Madison.
“Another opportunity”: that’s very clever, actually. Walker’s on the wrong side of both policy and politics in this matter.
The Journal Times of Racine has an editorial, entitled, Abuse for abuse not a good trade that describes Chianelli’s detestable policy:
Chianelli reportedly told the committee, “It’s a trade-off. Putting 24 aggressive male patients into a male-only unit would increase the level of the violence in the unit.”
So you compromise the safety of female inpatients and put them at greater risk of sexual assault in order to reduce male-on-male violence in a segregated unit?
What a bizarre and frightening “trade-off” – a Faustian bargain if ever there was one….
How cynical is that?
….But there are more problems than that at the Mental Health Complex.
The federal government earlier this year threatened to withhold millions in Medicaid and Medicare funds after it found multiple instances of improper patient sexual contact. It then cleared the health complex after another inspection in March.
County board members have also expressed dismay over Chianelli’s communication with them, saying he hasn’t kept them promptly informed of the rise in sexual assaults last year, the federal investigation or a $3.6 million deficit in his division.
Clearly, Chianelli faces a host of problems and will have to answer for them. There is nothing illegal about mixed-sex housing of patients at mental health facilities and there may be therapeutic value to that.
But to take a stance that one patient’s right to be free from sexual assault risk can be bartered away to less expensively reduce the overall violence among males in such a facility goes beyond callous.
If Milwaukee needs to spend additional money to make its facilities secure and keep patients from harm – male or female – it should do so.
Chianelli doesn’t appear to be the right administrator to get that done.
He should be asked to choose between the lesser of two personal evils: resign or be fired.
That’s a better trade-off than he offered his patients.
Yes, go he must, and the sooner the better.
Good morning,
It’s a rainy day for Whitewater again today, with a high of sixty-eight degrees.
It’s wild hair day today, at Lakeview School. There will also be a Middle School Band concert at Whitewater High School tonight at 7 p.m.
Wired recalls that today is a day of frustration for many, a reduction in congestion for others, and profit for municipalities, in a post entitled, “May 13, 1935: Enter the Parking Meter:”
If it weren’t for Pearl Harbor, FDR might have called May 13 a day that will live in infamy. It was 75 years ago that Carl C. Magee of Oklahoma City sought a patent for the world’s first parking meter. Many will come to see the invention as a bane of urban living.
Soon after Magee filed to protect his intellectual property, the world’s first installed parking meters were put into nickel-gulping service right there in Oklahoma City in July 1935. Your five cents (about $.80 in today’s money) got you anywhere from 15 minutes’ to an hour’s worth of parking, depending on location….
Even back in 1935, U.S. cities were having thoroughly modern problems: Workers parked on downtown streets and stayed all day. That left few spaces for shoppers and others who visited the central business district….
Carl Magee’s new parking meter not only solved Oklahoma City’s parking problems, it also got a new revenue stream flowing in to city coffers. Magee mentioned money in the patent application for “meters for measuring the time of occupancy or use of parking or other space, for the use of which it is desirous an incidental charge be made upon a time basis.”
U.S. Patent No. 2,118,318 was granted for the device May 24, 1938. The idea spread to other cities around the country and the world. Magee managed to make money manufacturing meters and selling them to many municipalities, starting at $23 a pop ($365 in current cash).
Update, 5-13-10: All of what I write below rests on the idea that the all-you-can-drink ban would lead to some reduction in tavern drinking, as proponents certainly hope. If that’s not true, and their lack of confidence is an inability to reduce tavern drinking, then the ordinance is an exercise in futility, and an embarrassment for being so ineffectual. So there the possibilities before proponents: (1) effective at stopping tavern drinking, but at risk of shifting unmonitored drinking elsewhere, or (2) an ordinance easily circumvented in taverns. This ordinance was ill-considered and foolish, all the way around.
Here’s a bit more on banning all-you-can drink specials. Whitewater’s ordinance is notable for its flimsy justification, and we’re likely to find a similar flimsiness in other ordinances yet to be proposed.
I wrote about two aspects of Whitewater’s ban last week — its bad origins and the false empiricism used to justify the ordinance. See, Whitewater’s Ban on Drink Specials: Bad Origins and False Empiricism. (My two contentions: that the ordinance looks like a shield for the uncompetitive from the competitive, and comparisons of statutes to other statutes are a false empiricism, not assessing properly the relationship between legislation and public health.)
Here are four more points:
1. “Admitting” Harms. Over the weekend, a commenter by the name of For People Not Profit wrote that a bar owner in Whitewater admitted that alcohol kills. I had no idea what he or she meant, but I think I’ve found the supposed admission, from a Gazette story published online on Friday morning. Here’s the statement to which I think the commenter was referring:
Dave Bergman, owner of the Brass Rail, 130 W. Main St., said bars that offer such specials are being irresponsible and putting the community at risk.
“We’re supposed to be responsible servers,” he said. “But when you have $5 all-you-can-drink, and people get so intoxicated and possibly go out and kill themselves or somebody else (in an accident), that’s not responsible. I don’t believe in that.”
This is a remark about what other bar owners may have done, not what the speaker has done. It’s a reference to other owners (left unstated!), not to himself.
That’s not an admission, it’s a vague accusation.
It’s others, somewhere else … This is the kind of connection one makes, to a supposed harm, when one does not want to bother with the concrete, substantial, and verifiable. It’s easy, and as unsound as it is easy.
2. A speculative, inflammatory ordinance. Perhaps, one’s wondering if there was any serious public health research offered behind Whitewater’s ordinance. Stop wondering — there wasn’t. Here’s how the draft ordinance, from the Common Council packet, begins:
(a) Purpose. The City Council hereby recognizes that all you can drink specials and other offers that encourage excessive alcohol consumption can lead to alcohol abuse which causes dangerous and irresponsible behavior by persons, including operating motor vehicles while under the influence of intoxicants, domestic abuse, disorderly conduct, public intoxication, and alcohol-related health problems, and therefore should be discouraged.
It’s all just a chain of what might happen, what could happen, with list of horrors that result from over-drinking. One doesn’t know how likely any of this will be, but it all might happen.
I’ll assume that these ill-consequences of over-drinking are more likely than an asteroid impact or a tsunami in Whitewater. How much more, to produce a concrete assessment of the scare-list provided, I don’t know. No one else in town does either, including those who drafted and those who voted for the ordinance.
I know some will contend that one shouldn’t be flippant about these harms. I’m not. On the contrary, I think the ordinance’s proponents have been cavalier, speculative, inflammatory, and ill-considerded by turns.
They want to discourage a bad thing, yet most people would prefer to discourage the bad, and encourage the good. One need not do it, and may not do it well, through legislation.
3. Ignoring the Consequences of Regulation. Note how proponents of this ordinance imply that there are only two consequences of it: reducing the ill effects of alcohol, or merely being symbolic, merely making a statement.
I will note also how much doubt this reveals. Proponents are hardly confident. It’s all
“There’s clear evidence that shows that all-you-can-drink specials and similar promotions tend to lead to overindulgence in alcohol, and that can result in public safety issues such as injuries and deaths from drunken driving and other crimes,” and
‘”It might help. I’m not saying it’s going to stop (binge drinking), but it’s a step in the right direction,” and making
“a statement.”
If proponents really feel that a statement is the most this ban may yield, then they’ve chosen the wrong method. Desire to make a statement does not justify an ordinance, but rather a resolution.
In any event, to the extent the ordinance reduces drinking in regulated, public taverns, proponents should ask themselves: Will this stop the behavior they seek to stop, or drive even some of it underground into unregulated, less safe environments?
4. Advocates of the ordinance are not sure that it will stop binge drinking, but if they’re not sure, where do they think that drinking might continue? If not taverns, then where?
Even if the amount of binge drinking in total is less, a small amount driven to a less open setting runs dangers in aggregate to public health health. These dangers of notice, access to services, and lack of licensed monitoring are real.
The ban is applied to a definite number of taverns; yet, for it all, it’s the behavior not of businesses but of individuals that presents danger. These individuals can walk or drive to darker and more dangerous venues. Ignoring as much is foolish and reckless, all for making a so-called statement.
That’s why regulations like this are no easy thing, no recourse quickly to be adopted (and certainly not the way this came about).
Note what’s telling — doubt about whether this will stop binge drinking comes from proponents themselves, and their own uncertainty fuels my contention that drinking may be driven underground. Their doubts bolster my position. If they were confident they might still be wrong; as it is, they’re not even confident.
One is reminded of the adage that one who asserts should prove. They’ve not done so, and their stated doubts act as evidence for a counter-argument.
This is more than regulatory over-reach: there’s foolishness to this approach to public heath that’s to no one’s credit.
There’s a quarterly meeting of Whitewater’s Police and Fire Commission scheduled for tonight. The agenda is available online.
One sees that on May 5th, this was the distribution of the agenda:
May 5, 2010 Emailed/mailed to PFC members
Faxed to the Whitewater Register for posting
Faxed to the Library for posting
Emailed to Channel 13 for posting
Emailed to City Clerk’s Office for posting on City Hall bulletin board
Posted on City of Whitewater Website (ci.whitewater.wi.us)
It’s too funny to describe something as “[f]axed to the Whitewater Register for posting.” Perhaps they stuck the notice on the bulletin board of the office that’s not in Whitewater anymore.
More important, of course, is who writes (and thus sets) the agenda. One can see from the .pdf document that the agenda was prepared in city hall; was it written there, too, by a bureaucrat rather than by a PFC member?
I don’t know. I do know that a PFC that acted as Wisconsin statutes require would be more than a lapdog or rubber stamp of a police chief, and would have members who would craft their own agenda items, and make it clear that they had. Nothing in this agenda makes that clear.
The meeting’s in that same, cramped space that’s comfortable only for insiders, and is uninviting for guests. It’s called the City Manager’s Conference Room, but it might just as well be the Insider Sekret Club Hous. A meeting like this, held quarterly, should be held each and every time in a large, spacious room, on the first floor of the building in which the meeting is held. If the Planning Commission and Common Council can meet in a room like that, so can the PFC.
Who’s responsibility is all this? If one reads the city’s website, this morning, one sees a proud declaration of all of City Manager, Kenin Brunner’s many responsibilities, including over the PFC.
Here’s a screen shot:
City Manager Department
The City Manager plans and directs the administration of the City to ensure that efficient municipal services are provided and are in line with Common Council objectives.
Administration department functions include: Liaison to the Common Council advising them on all significant matters and presenting all items which require Council action or approval. Directs, develops and implements appropriate budgeting, including capital improvements and administrative planning and control procedures.
Provides communications and public relations to the news media and people in the community through various communications media. Coordinates with other governmental agencies and represents the interests of the City in metropolitan, state, county, school district, and national activities as delegated by the City Council.
Responsible for effective recommendations in areas of policies, planning, administering community services, community development, public safety, administrative services, financial planning, and human resources. Works closely with each department to plan and coordinate activities to ensure effective service to the public and efficient conduct of all municipal affairs.
The City Manager oversees: City Clerk, Neighborhood Services Administrator, Finance Director, Park & Recreation Director, Public Works Director, The Community Development Authority, Police and Fire Commission, Library Board, and respectively oversees: Community Development Authority Director, Fire Chief, Police Chief, and the Library Director.
That’s an impressive and exhaustive list. I’m just not sure what it means to say that the city manager oversees the police chief, the fire chief, as well as the Police and Fire Commission.
There are two way to consider the city manager’s oversight.
Perhaps it means, literally, that he stands on a step ladder, and looks down on the police chief, fire chief, or PFC from on high. If that’s what oversight means, then it’s possible that Kevin Brunner does oversee these officials and this commission that way. I’ve never heard that he does this, but it’s possible, I suppose.
If, instead, the list of powers and duties means that he has legal oversight over these groups, it’s false. False, as contrary to Wisconsin law. Our laws do not place authority over these groups in the hands of the city manager, and anyone able to read can see as much under Wisconsin’s statutes. See, Police and Fire Commission: Importance and Authority.
Either the city manager has served years and years ignorant of the laws of our state, or he simply writes what he wants on the city website, ignoring that there’s a world (and law) beyond the city limits.
As a practical matter, it’s even more risible to suggest that this city manager exercises oversight, unless that means defending every error and mistake others have made. Even our PFC (astoundingly by local ordinance rather than Wisconsin statute) has no oversight over the fire department!
Is there no one upon whom this city administration relies, in all the city, who can give a city manager with a poor grasp of the law a better understanding? No one? (Here I refer to more than the recourse of the blind leading the blind.)
If, though, he assumes this authority, however presumptuously, the least he could do is exercise it well. As it is, his supposed authority has done no good for the city, mired as we are in third-tier practices.
Tonight’s an organizational meeting of the PFC, and afterward there will be closed-session interviews for a part of the meeting time, and that’s not a date that I’d propose for the introduction of television. That time while come, though, meeting in and meeting out, surely and soon.
Good morning,
The forecast calls for Whitewater calls for a chance of drizzle with showers tonight, and a high temperature of forty-nine degrees.
At the high school tonight, there will be a spring concert at 7:30 p.m.
There’s a story from yesterday’s Wisconsin State Journal about a tenured professor in the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s veterinary school, who lost his laboratory privileges. Here’s why:
A UW-Madison professor who studies an infectious disease lost his laboratory privileges for five years after conducting unauthorized experiments with a potentially dangerous drug-resistant germ.
One person who worked in professor Gary Splitter’s lab got brucellosis but university officials don’t know if that individual, who has since recovered, caught the strain used in the unauthorized experiments. Brucellosis is a disease that is usually found in farm animals but can spread to humans and cause flu-like symptoms or worse.
“These are extremely dangerous compounds,” UW-Madison Provost Paul DeLuca said. “They are very highly regulated and we want to be in full compliance with federal laws.”
The 2007 experiments, which the National Institutes of Health calls a “major action violation,” in part prompted the university to beef up its biological safety oversight. The university was also fined $40,000.
Here’s Splitter’s flimsy excuse explanation:
Splitter said he was not aware of the unauthorized experiments, which he said were conducted by graduate students in his lab, and that the university did not properly educate researchers about guidelines for working with antibiotic-resistant strains.
“The University of Wisconsin failed to provide the right education,” Splitter said. “The bottom line is that this wasn’t just an investigation of one individual. It was a major meltdown by the university.”
No, Splitter was responsible for the work in his laboratory, and for students under his charge. It’s not the whole school, the City of Madison, Dane County, the State of Wisconsin, or United States that bear responsibility.
It’s Splitter.
Splitter might consider using his free time during the five-year laboratory ban to consider a career as a municipal bureaucrat. If he’s interested in a position, I can think of just the place:
Readers of FREE WHITEWATER know how much I like cats, as do all decent, normal people. Here’s a video of a cat and two of her kittens on a slide. Enjoy.
Hat tip to Instapundit.com for the link. more >>
It’s a common libertarian complaint that no major-party candidate was, is, or ever will be, libertarian enough. So, Goldwater wasn’t good enough, Reagan wasn’t good enough, and Paul Ryan’s not good enough. That’s to be expected — these men didn’t set out to be good enough for us. They weren’t running as libertarians, but as conservative Republicans. They were, and Ryan is, running in a different and much larger party.
They represent, though, support for the worthy goals of individual liberty, limited government, and free markets. Whenenever I read William Redpath, Chairman of the LP, contending that Reagan wasn’t libertarian enough, I think: Yes, but have you done more to advance our goals? (So that Redpath’s not mistaken, I will note that my question is rhetorical.)
There’s a good article on Paul Ryan, U.S. representative from Wisconsin’s first district, in the latest issue of Reason, entitled, “Paul Ryan: Radical or Sellout?”
Ryan has a proposal to restore stability to the federal government’s finances:
According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), which produces Congress’ official projections about the long-term fiscal effects of legislation, Ryan’s “Roadmap for America’s Future” would balance the budget by 2063 and reduce Medicare’s expected share of the economy from a currently projected 14.3 percent in 2080 to a mere 4 percent.
It would also transform Medicare itself, using vouchers to push health care decisions toward the individual as it drastically cuts government spending. It calls as well for a substantial simplification of the tax code and the replacement of the corporate income tax with an 8.5 percent business consumption tax.
CBO’s projections are inherently uncertain – even the most competent economic forecasters can only guess at how the world will change over 50 years, and the plan’s revenue assumptions have already come under fire. But Ryan’s roadmap is, at the very least, a compelling vision of a fiscally sound future.
One can find a copy of Ryan’s plan at http://www.roadmap.republicans.budget.house.gov/Plan/.
As Reason‘s associate editor Peter Suderman observes, Ryan’s no radical:
In the current political climate, Ryan’s plan will never pass. It is not merely too radical for the Democrats; it is too radical for the Republicans. But to be too radical for the party that championed an unfunded prescription drug benefit in 2003 and rang up massive deficits while in power, one need not be radical at all.
Ryan’s reputation as an extremist is based on the standards of the modern-day political mainstream. It may say more about the state of U.S. politics than it does about the congressman from Wisconsin. In a saner world, a civil, even-tempered numbers geek like Ryan wouldn’t find his plans relegated to the policy fringe. Nor would anyone mistake him for a libertarian purist. He did, after all, back the bank and auto bailouts. He isn’t averse to local pork either, having nabbed a $750,000 earmark for his hometown transit system in 2007….
No politician’s record is pure. Perhaps it isn’t reasonable to expect anything different, since politics is the business of compromise. For advocates of limited government, Ryan remains one of the most important allies in Congress. But those advocates can’t help but notice that the best hope for fiscal responsibility and free market reform is a plan to balance the budget 50 years from now that will never, ever pass.
Ryan claims victory just for showing “you can put these ideas out there and you can survive.” Survive, yes, but thrive? Asked directly about his plan’s political prospects, he pauses for an unusually long time, then shrugs and smiles, as if to welcome both the uncertainty and the challenge. “When I have it all figured out,” he says, “I’ll let you know.”
That’s doggie bags as scoop bags, not ones for leftover food. Either way, there’s no way that suburban Edina, Minnesota’s local government should have been buying bags for people to use for their pups.
I’d guess there’s at least one resident who sees this as a failure of government. On the contrary, the only failure was starting to provide scoop bags in the first place.
Doubt not the agricultural prowess of America’s Dairyland. We’re the cheese capital of America, single-handedly producing twenty-six percent of the country’s total cheese output in 2009.
I posted yesterday on the immoral and disordered policy of John Chianelli, Milwaukee County’s mental health director. Chianelli has implemented a plan to house female mental patients with male ones, with the supposed goal of trading the risk of male-on-male physical violence for male-on-female sexual assault. The policy of trading injury this way among mental health patients, rather than a commitment to reducing all violence, isn’t just immoral, but perversely so. See, A Milwaukee County Bureaucrat’s Immoral Utilitarianism.
Chianelli is unfit to serve in a position of such decision-making, and should be removed. Those who fail to remove him share in the responsibility — and deserved obloquy — of Chianelli’s policy. I am convinced that it would be impossible for a person of sound judgment to support any official who had the power to remove Chianelli and did not do so. Officials like this place others at risk, and disgrace Milwaukee, and Wisconsin, with a policy that’s fundamentally wrong. Those who endure an official like Chianelli, whose policy should be anathema to anyone of normal sense, without protesting disgrace themselves.
(It’s possible that there might be some position, without decision-making authority, and under careful supervision of others, where Chianelli might still work. It cannot be, soundly, in his present role. I would doubt that he should ever be given decision-making authority over others.)
Fortunately, three Milwaukee County supervisors now called for Chianelli’s ouster. In doing so, they have acted on behalf of institutionalized patients. They could be expected to do no less. See, Supervisors call for firing of county mental health chief.
Here’s more from the latest Journal Sentinel story:
Jon Gudeman, former medical director at the county’s psychiatric hospital, said Monday that the county immediately must set up a ward where patients who are aggressive can be held separately.
Problems scrutinized
Sexual assaults of patients, by patients, brought the issue of Chianelli’s job performance to the forefront. A federal report listed multiple instances of improper sexual contact among patients at the complex in 2009.
Supervisors also were critical of Chianelli’s failure to promptly notify supervisors of the assaults last year and a federal investigation in January. De Bruin also faulted Chianelli for failing to provide reports ordered by the County Board on how acute psychiatric patients are housed and for belatedly notifying the board late last year of a $3.6 million deficit in his division.
Unfortunately, but perhaps predictably,
Milwaukee county’s County Executive Scott Walker on Monday defended the county’s practice of combining male and female psychiatric patients in its locked wards. He said other public psychiatric hospitals in the state have mixed units, except the state’s Mendota Mental Health Institute in Madison.
“Many experts believe this policy is good for treatment as clients prepare to return to the community,” Walker said in an e-mail. He said that policy would be reviewed “to ensure that it is best for the clients.”
Walker did not respond to the call for Chianelli’s replacement. Walker chief of staff Tom Nardelli, in a written response, said “potential disciplinary action” was under review. He said the County Board leadership had been kept fully informed on mental health issues.
The Mental Health Complex is the subject of several ongoing investigations. A comprehensive state and federal inspection is under way, and a county audit of issues surrounding the assaults started last week. Reports on those reviews aren’t expected for months. Disability Rights Wisconsin, the state-designated patient advocacy agency, is expected to issue preliminary findings of its investigation this month.
In addition, several state legislators are seeking a state audit of the complex.
Walker’s county has a facility with a rising number of sexual assaults, and yet he defends the practice of mixing male and female mental patients — including violent ones — as a way to “prepare [them] to return to the community.”
I would ask Walker what sort of community he has in mind. I can assure him it is not one in which a normal person would wish to live. I have sympathy for anyone who has to endure the imposition of this policy.
Walker’s response is both predictable and discouraging. To lead a state in troubled times, especially, he will require better judgment than he’s yet shown on this matter.
