Whitewater’s Wednesday forecast calls for a chance of snow, with a high temperature of twenty-six.
In the Whippet City today, there’s a 9 a.m. meeting of the Tech Park Board. The agenda for the meeting is available online.
At Washington School, home of the Golden Eagles, there’s a 2 p.m. and 7 p.m. fifth grade band concert. At the middle school, there’s a 7 p.m. PTO meeting tonight.
NASA has had more than its share of challenges lately, and a supporter of space exploration recently took to YouTube to offer a tribute to that agency’s work. YouTUbe user dameswe‘s creation is better than any promotional video NASA’s recently offered.
Giovanni Estrada, now 20, entered the plea in court this morning. Investigators say he tried to drown the cat in its locked carrier back in September because it killed one of his pet crawfish.
The cat, later named “Lovie” for her affection towards caretakers, had been shot by a BB gun multiple times. She was found by a passerby after the carrier was thrown into McKay Bay. Lovie was cared for by veterinarians and later adopted.
Prof. Volokh lists seven key points for understanding First Amendment law involving allegedly threatening speech toward officials. His post is well worth reading (as is true, I think, of all his work).
On Saturday afternoon, with his friend Gabby Giffords in surgery fighting for her life, Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik railed against the tense partisan politics – “the anger, the hatred, the bigotry” – that prompted the mass murders outside Tucson, in his view.
And, jarring as such claims may be, we understood. Or tried to understand, despite the spectacle of a lawman – an official whose very job it is to dispassionately gather facts and to maintain order and calm – tying the attack on Rep. Giffords and others to political speech in Arizona, which he considers prejudiced and bigoted. There is no evidence that the state’s politics in any way contributed to this atrocity….
Dupnik took up his cause again on Monday. And, in response, we have to say at last . . . enough. Enough attacks, sheriff. Enough vitriol. It is well past time for the sheriff of Pima County to get a grip on his emotions and remember his duty.
With each passing hour, we learn more about the 22-year-old suspect. And everything we learn adds to the profile of a deeply troubled young man detached from reality. There is nothing to date that suggests any partisan motivation for his crimes, whether right-wing or left.
Dupnik needs to recall that he is elected to be a lawman. With each additional comment, the Democratic sheriff of Pima County is revealing his agenda as partisan, and, as such, every bit as recklessly antagonistic as the talk-show hosts and politicians he chooses to decry.
Readers will recall a story from 2009 about Walworth County’s lawsuit against a crime victim to collect part of the cost of an expert the county hired to aid in the prosecution of those who victimized her. I wrote at the time that the county’s lawsuit was “an astonishing and disgraceful departure from legal custom in Wisconsin.” Fox 6 Milwaukee covered the story.
When Walworth County resident Linda Goes, and other families, went to Walworth County D.A. Koss about the theft they suffered from a contractor, he agreed to prosecute the contractor and his wife. Later, when the case drew closer to trial, Koss went to the crime victims and asked them to pay for the prosecution’s expert witness (whose testimony concerned the alleged swindle against Goes and others.)
Goes rightly refused to pay for a prosecution witness, and so Walworth County sued her for thousands in fees.
The builder (Art Reeves) admitted guilt, but his wife and business partner (Beth Reeves) went to trial, and was convicted (several felony convictions).
Beth Reeves appealed her conviction, and predictably — as anyone of even average judgment would know — the demand of a crime victim’s payment for a prosecution witness has jeopardized the conviction.
The Wisconsin Attorney General’s Office has now issued an eight-page memorandum to an appeals court in support of the position that Koss’s demand or payment of the expert’s fee was an error, and that the defendant’s conviction should therefore be overturned.
That’s the right result — no victim should have to pay for her own expert, and that payment taints the prosecution of the criminal defendant. It makes criminal justice a matter of wealth.
One should note that it was Koss who demanded this money; this idea began with his office, not the crime victims.
Koss and Assistant D.A. Steve Madsen may find themselves having lost a conviction, through a disgraceful demand.
Note, also, that in 2009, Koss contended that he had support from the Wisconsin Attorney General’s Office to ask crime victim Linda Goes for part of the expert’s fee, but he never produced any letter or other document showing that he had that office’s support.
Considering that the Attorney General’s office expressly repudiates Koss’s odd approach, one wonders if Koss could ever have produced anything regarding his unsubstantiated claim of support from Madison.
For more examples of the mistakes, errors, and questionable decisions of Koss’s office, consider —
Finally, an entire section of a larger work about prosecutorial error concerns the Walworth County District Attorney’s Office under Koss – see, A Poisoned Prosecution.more >>
It’s a snowy day for Whitewater, with a high of twenty-seven, and one to two inches of accumulation predicted.
The New York Times recalls that on this day in 1935, Amelia Earhart became the first woman to fly solo across the Pacific, from Honolulu to Oakland:
She entered her plane with a wave of her hand and a smile to the mechanics as she ordered the blocks pulled from in front of the wheels. Taxiing to her starting point, she gave the heavily loaded Lockheed Vega the full gun and after a run of 3,000 feet rose into the air.
Think that “clean” elections laws keep elections, well, fair and clean? You might be surprised. The U.S. Supreme Court is considering an Institute for Justice challenge to the fairness of Arizona’s supposedly clean election laws.
Here’s a video from the IJ entitled, “The Dirty Game of AZ’s “Clean Elections.” Below the video, I have placed the part of the text of a web release about what’s a stake: privately-funded candidates lose out as taxpayer money drowns out the message of candidates who rely on their own supporters’ voluntary contributions rather than government money.
Arlington, Va. – On, Tuesday, Nov. 23, 2010, the U.S. Supreme Court is scheduled to decide whether to hear a challenge by the Institute for Justice to Arizona’s “Clean Elections” Act in the case of Arizona Free Enterprise Club’s Freedom Club PAC v. Bennett. Actions taken by the High Court earlier this year lead many to believe there is a better-than-average chance the Court will accept this case for review.
For a brief, funny video explaining how the “Clean Election” system rigs political races in favor of government-funded candidates, visit: www.ij.org/AZCleanElectionsVideo.
Arizona’s “Clean Elections” Act gives public money to politicians to run for office and squelches the free speech of independent groups, as well as candidates who choose to forgo taxpayer dollars and instead raise their own funds for their campaigns. For every dollar an independent group opposing a publicly financed candidate or a traditionally funded candidate spends above a certain amount, the government hands taxpayer dollars over to the publicly financed candidates in the race. This allows the government-subsidized candidate to “match” the spending – and thus the speech – of the independent group or privately funded candidate opposing him. The harder an independent group or traditionally financed candidate works, the more the government-subsidized candidate benefits. The Act curbs speech, discourages participation and limits what voters will hear about politics.
Only the tiniest handful of people—most of whom are already behind bars, in psychiatric institutions, or on psycho-meds—can be driven to kill by political whispers or shouts. Asking us to forever hold our tongues lest we awake their deeper demons infantilizes and neuters us and makes politicians no safer.
Today’s forecast calls for a mostly cloudy day with a high temperature of twenty-nine (with small accumulations of snow likely tonight and tomorrow).
In Whitewater today, there’s a schedule meeting of the Park and Rec Board at 10 a.m. The agenda is available online. Later, at 6:30 p.m., there’s a meeting of the Library Board. That agenda is also online.
In our schools, there will be a special meeting of the WUSD board at 6 p.m., at Central Office. The meeting agenda concerns a possible (and likely) charter school for Whitewater.:
Call to Order and Roll Call
Charter School Authorizer Training – Mr. John Gee, Executive Director, Wisconsin Charter Schools Association
Charter School Contract Review
Research Request Approval (Action Item)
Adjourn
Quick note: items on the district’s website are virtually unlinkable, leaving that website far less useful than it might otherwise be.
On this day in 1776, Thomas Paine first published anonymously the pamphlet Common Sense. The full text is available at Google Books.
