Be Careful Of Your Sources

by capper

In an column written by Eugene Kane, he discusses the late night hours which recently ended at the House Of Corrections. In his article, he has some quotes from Richard Cox, the former superintendent of the HOC. From my understanding, Mr. Cox was a well-respected administrator at HOC and a lot of officers were sad to see him leave that position. However, Mr. Cox has been out of the system for the better part of a decade, and it would seem that a lot of things have changed since then.

An example would be that Mr. Cox is quoted as saying there is only 29 individual cells. That is not accurate. There are about three times that number of individual cells. The column also has this:

"It's a dormitory-style facility," Cox said. When the lights go out, he said, it doesn't make a difference if the inmates are in their beds or congregating among themselves.

I can personally testify that is not true. I have spoken to a friend that still works at HOC and he said that there is a greatly noticeable difference since the late nights have stopped. There are less fights and less disturbances. The inmates that are less prone to want to stay up are also calmer because now they can sleep at night.

Perhaps it is due to the length of time of Mr. Cox's absence from HOC, or the probably longer time since he actually worked a dorm, but the nature of the inmates have changed over the past ten years. They are younger, meaner and more prone to bad decisions. The change in late nights helps the beleaguered officers maintain better control of their dorms and increases safety for the inmates and officers alike.

In a similar fashion, MSJ also has a story about Jack L. Hohrein, the Milwaukee County retirement manager. Mr. Hohrein has filed for the race for County Executive, and states that he feels that County Executive Scott Walker has gone as far as interfering with a criminal investigation by putting the brakes on an independent investigation of the latest pension scandal.

When I first heard this story, I followed up on it eagerly. As anyone who has read most of my postings knows, I am know fan of Scott Walker, and I wondered what kind of stunt Walker was trying to pull now.

However, at this time, I am not going to cover this story, outside of this post. Not because I suddenly like the Tosa Ranger, but because I cannot trust the source of the information. While Mr. Hohrein may be telling the truth, or at least believes he is, he is not a credible source at this time.

The article goes on and informs us that Mr. Hohrein is currently on paid suspension, pending the outcome of an investigation into a complaint of harassment. He also states that he "expects to be fired for speaking out" and that he feels he was only suspended due to comments he made about the investigation. This makes his motivation suspect and makes one wonder if he is coming out with this as an attempt to cover his problems and protect his position with the county.

Like I said earlier, he may be very well telling the truth, but without collaborating evidence, I cannot find him a credible source of information, and will only take his allegations about a cover-up with a grain of salt. But I will continue to follow this story just in case that grain of salt turns into a kernel of truth.

When Is a Crisis Not a Crisis?

by capper

First, I would like to thank Jay for inviting me to be the 151st member of Team folkbum.

After the Juneteenth Day beating of Pat Kasthurirangaian, many people decried the senseless violence, and rightfully so. But then the right wing bloggers continued to decry the act, day after day. Then they decried those that they felt didn't decry the incident stridently enough.

Now that Summerfest has wrapped up its 40th year, the crime report is out. MSJ reports that 450 people were arrested with a total of 628 charges. While most of the charges are related to underage drinking or possession of a controlled substance, there were also arrests for battery, disorderly conduct, resisting arrest and obstructing an officer. Surely, there would be lamentations about the wild crowds, especially since crime was up by one and half times as that of last year.

But there were no cries for justice, no calls to close Summerfest, not even some gnashing of teeth or hair pulling. Instead, the only comments that the right had about this crisis that was Summerfest was that Ludicrus would be appearing, causing chaos throughout the city (Sorry, Charlie, never happened) or that Roger Waters wouldn't change his anti-war, anti-establishment attitude for them. One talk show host commiserated with a Waukesha County man on how unfair the police were for giving his underage daughter a citation for possession of alchohol. One would think that at the very least, seeing that 65% of the scofflaws were from outside of Milwaukee County, that they would call for a wall to be built around the county to keep these thugs out.

Demands

I wrote most of a draft of this post this morning, but, screw it. Just go read this. It's better than I was doing.

Stone Phillips has been let go by NBC

So says Tim Cuprisin. No word yet on what it was Phillips said about Eugene Kane to get himself fired.

McIlheran Watch: I'll Let Brother Bob Answer

I'm a little behind, here. I got lazy, I think, while Patrick McIlheran was on vacation. But he came back last week, and threw this entry onto his blog (as a response to a Eugene Kane column). Of interest:

Kane contends that voucher schools "won't accept kids with the kind of disciplinary problems that are ruining public schools, making MPS the last resort for many students."

Not to be pushy about this, but ... wrong. I've pointed this out extensively, writing, for example, about children such as Lanisha Harris. She was expelled from MPS' Bay View High School, then taken in by a choice school, CEO Leadership Academy. [. . .]

But the plain fact is that choice schools do take in children who pose discipline problems in MPS. What they try doing, then, is fixing the discipline problems. Public schools do as much as well, though they seem hampered by rules and circumstances. Choice schools can try alternate approaches. The one thing they cannot and do not do is leave all the problems for MPS.

We've had this talk here before, and while it's true that in the application process, schools cannot legally apply any test to students--behavior, disability, race, religion, and so on--once the students are in a voucher school, they are there at the pleasure of the school.

Brother Bob Smith, who, aside from Tommy Thompson, may be the most public face of vouchers. The former Messmer High School president and current director of education for the Archdiocese spoke to a conservative audience this winter; he put it this way: Kids have to “make the right decisions, or make them somewhere else.”

That hardly sounds like someone willing to bend over backward to "fix" the discipline problems. McIlheran's anecdotes do demonstrate that not every voucher school has a quick trigger when it comes to booting behavior problems. But Brother Bob makes it clear that the voucher schools do not have to--and often choose not to--suffer so much from the kinds of problems that MPS cannot, by state law, avoid. So, not to be pushy about this, but Eugene Kane is ... basically right.

At least according to Brother Bob.

(We had a similar conversation a while back discussing McIlheran's contentions about special education and vouchers, contentions which also appear in the current suspect blog post.)

The obligatory "Eugene Kane's a bit of an idiot" post . . . sigh

by folkbum

I don't have the kind of visceral, lizard-brain reaction to Eugene Kane you regularly see from the right side of the Cheddarsphere. It could be in part because I know half of what he does is schtick--no less schtick than, say, Sean Hannity, but in a completely different flavor. The other half of what he does, though, is provide White Suburban Milwaukee with the only black voice they hear regularly, with the possible exception of Randy Jackson on "American Idol."

Kane was at the Blog Summit with the rest of us Saturday. He got a column out of it. You can read what everyone else says, but, note, they're angry. Be prepared for all that.

Here's what gives me a problem:

The half-day summit at Marquette University Law School was billed as the second such event, representing the growing impact of blogs written by both professionals and amateurs on current issues in the media, politics and society. Many at the summit--which was attended by approximately 90 people, according to WisPolitics.com--were the faceless and sometimes nameless writers who post blog items with stupefying regularity.

Many post multiple items a day, though few earn their living writing blogs or writing anything else.

I was invited to participate in a panel discussion on the need for more diversity in the blogosphere. Some bloggers were reportedly eager to make my acquaintance, although few took the opportunity.

Stupefying regularity? Gene, you shouldn't say such things about Tim Cuprisin . . . But, more seriously, though Kane points out that the summit was supposed to be a half-day (though it didn't last more than four hours), he arrived just before his panel began and was out of the room just after his panel ended. His panel-mates Jennifer Morales and Dasha Kelly stuck around--Kelly for the entire rest of the program. What kind of opportunity would that provide to meet him? Running after him through the hall, desperately trying to flag him down and, gasping for air, push out our blog name and pump his retreating hand?

In the end, Kane reminds us of exactly what John Kraus had mentioned earlier, that the real success of the blogs will come not from continuing to whale away on our keyboards, but rather from making the rubber meat the road. True success in changing the face of the media or the face of politics won't happen as long as you stay in your basement.

But at the same time, true success in building bridges with others and creating a dialogue between yourself and those who "regularly take pleasure bashing [your] column" won't happen until you're willing to take the time to let that outreach happen. Next time, Gene, follow your own advice, and get out of your own basement.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's Continuing War on Blogs

The most recent volley has been fired, sadly, by Barbara Miner, whose work--particularly her work for Rethinking Schools--I usually enjoy immensely. Miner's essay essentially dismisses blogs, for being too numerous, too white and male, too exhausting, and (ironically) too co-opted by the mainstream now to be cool.

I'll give her the last one (Barney's Blog, anyone?), but I say it's ironic, becuase the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel is busy trying to co-opt this blog game for itself at the same time it's trying to turn people away from real blogs like the one you're currently holding in your hands.

Follow the trail: It starts innocuously, with the paper giving its columnists and some reporters their own "blogs," which, the cynical me thinks, is an easy way to squeeze more content out of them for the same salary. For a long time, it was mostly sports guys, and some regular folk conned into blogging for the man through MKE or about the Packers. But the corral of corporate bloggers grows ever larger, with two of the most recent inductees being Eugene Kane and Spivak and Bice.

It is important to note, kind of as a prelude to the war's Lexington and Concord, that Greg Borowski article I was quoted in which, while not negative about the blogs, was generally dismissive of blogs' overall power and effectiveness. Call that the beginning of the strategic air war, so to speak: the softening up of the public so that they would be ready to ignore the blogs.

Kane opened the war wide when he wrote about blogging in his regular paper-and-ink column. "If a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it," Kane asked, "has it made a sound? In a nutshell, that's what I think about most blogs." Plugging his own blog as one of "the best," he blanketly labeld most of us as long-winded ax-grinders. He took more specific shots at particular Milwaukee-area bloggers, following up with more shots on his own tepid blog.

Spivak and Bice are blogging with the explicit task of "trudg[ing] through the scores of local political blogs so you don’t have to." Isn't that nice? Now you don't need to traffic your local independent bloggers at all, since the Spice Boys will tell you what is important.

Several other op-eds over the last couple of weeks have laid into blogs, including one by my own favorite target, Patrick McIlheran. And now there's one by Miner, prominent in Sunday's "Crossroads." Meantime, the Journal Sentinel is promoting its (presumably more responsible) blogs heavily on its website's front page.

This is absolutely ridiculous, but I guess this is kind of what happens when something gets commercialized, be it indy music, indy film, or whatever. I don't think it's because the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel is afraid of us; I think, instead, they see the writing on the wall about traditional newspapers. I know, I know--every time a new medium comes along (radio, TV, cable news, the internet), the demise of the newspapers has been prematurely predicted. But the blogs are different in one significant way: No longer are we news and opinion consumers limited to professionals (who, after all, populate radio, TV, and cable news); we are able to get content from anyone, anywhere, anytime. Audience beware, of course, because not everyone is trustworthy or even a particularly good speller. But the multiplicity of voices is, to me, the singular appeal of blogs. I get enough Eugene Kane in the paper; I don't need him five days a week, several times a day. (But he, also, needs a spellchecker.)

If I were a better military tactician, I would propose our (bloggers') counterattack. But I'm one of those lousy pinko hippy pacifist types. I'm sure the gung-ho warriors among my colleagues in the right half of the Cheddarsphere will think of something.

Voucher School Briefs

• Following the news last week that vouchers for the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program would likely be rationed next fall, I had a good and mostly productive argument with Paul from the Electric Commentary: Read posts one and two.
  
  
• The number is now two. That's two schools ever, in the 16-year history of Milwaukee's voucher program, that have been closed by the state because they could not meet bare minimum requirements to actually be called schools. It worries me that some of these kids will end up at my school, after having lost a semester of opportunity:

  In her decision, the examiner wrote that a Northside student testified that class time was spent "doing crossword puzzles and shooting dice." She also wrote that Northside officials testified that the school's curriculum is not finished and that it takes about three years to complete curriculum development. "Northside did not establish the point in time that textbooks were purchased for use at the school, nor the point in time when pupils began receiving instruction using such textbooks," the examiner wrote. [. . .]
  
  When reporters visited the school, at 4840 W. Fond du Lac Ave., on Tuesday, founder Ricardo Brooks said the school is still open, although no students appeared to be present. [. . .] Brooks is a former administrator from Academic Solutions, a voucher school closed down by the state last year.
  
  In December, a group of former teachers and administrators alleged in interviews with the Journal Sentinel and a letter to state officials that students at Northside regularly smoked pot, skipped school and shot dice without fear of punishment. "It's not a school," said LaTrina Cooper, a former co-principal, in a previous interview. "It's a holding place for students who I guess couldn't make it in (Milwaukee Public Schools). It's like a detention center. . . . We even had a student who rolled a (marijuana) blunt in front of the teacher in a classroom."

  I wrote about this story twice last fall already, so I won't belabor it any more, except to renew my call that all schools new to the voucher program should have a full academic year behind them before they start taking vouchers. That would have saved us hundreds of thousands of tax dollars on Northside.
  
  
• Eugene Kane, because he's apparently not in enough trouble with the blogs already, decides to lie in today's column about voucher advocate Howard Fuller (my bold):

  School choice is in the news again. [Governor Jim] Doyle wants to stop further enrollment because the population has hit the cap of about 14,500.
  
  This galls Fuller to no end, partly because he thinks Doyle is playing politics by appeasing the teachers union instead of doing the right thing.

  While Kane, through Fuller, does lay into Republicans (for voting "for school choice and [. . .] against everything else that black people need to better themselves"), he ignores the nearly two years that Doyle has been offering to compromise with Republicans in a way that would raise the cap. Moreover, Kane is trying to give J-Dizzle agency that he doesn't have: State law, not Doyle or the governor's office, sets the cap and demands an end to further enrollment, and, at any rate, the enforcement is handled by the Department of Public Instruction, not the executive. So by my count, that's at least three ways in which bolded sentence above is flatly untrue.
  
  The Amtal Rule covers how the rest of the column is too nice to Fuller.

I think Eugene Kane is talking about me . . .

Today's Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has a column by Eugene Kane about blogging:

If a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it, has it made a sound? In a nutshell, that's what I think about most blogs.

The Internet is overrun with blogs. These personal Web sites are written by both amateur and professional journalists with an ax to grind or strong opinions they are dying to express. Many of them are read by only a small group of readers, sometimes just family or friends.

Despite the current hype over bloggers taking on the mainstream media--"MSM" to many bloggers--I believe there's little chance that blogging will replace traditional forms of reporting and commentary. At least, not in the near future.

Following that, Kane tsk-tsks over a local blogger who disagreed with--and slammed pretty good--one Eugene Kane of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. (I am waiting for Patrick McIlheran's new blog, which, with any luck, will be complaints about me.)

Belle, who is studying journamlism, and has worked for, as Kane says we call it, the "MSM," has already noted the all-too-common fact that the headline writer didn't read Kane's column, labeling it "Blogging gives everyone a voice." While I doubt Kane disagrees with that, he certainly doesn't seem excited about some people's voices being out there. He pretty clearly disses Jessica McBride (who seems excited about that) and summons the bravado to tell bloggers, "Bring it on." (He should be careful: The last most famous demand to "bring it on" lead to two years of dramatic and deadly insurgency in Iraq.)

And I have to say that I hate "MSM." Not in the sense that I am in some kind of crusade against popular news sources, but rather that the term "MSM" and "mainstream media" were developed by conservatives primarily to further their claims of indemic victimhood. "MSM" = "liberal media." And it's stupid: For one, the most pouplar bloggers have readerships many times higher than some newsweeklies and daily newspapers. The figures Kane cites for jsonline--the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's web presence--are 2 million visitors a month. DailyKos, by contrast, gets 15 or 16 million hits a month. For another, the most avid users of the term "MSM" are members of the "MSM." Charlie Sykes, for example, is an employee of the city's biggest media conglomerate and a highly-rated radio talk-show host, and he delights in complaining about that rotten "MSM." Rush Limbaugh, Mark Belling, Sean Hannity, and so on, all perhaps the very definition of mainstream, piss and moan about the "MSM." As I said, it's stupid. Stupid and a half.

But what really gets me about Kane--despite the irony of his pimping his own blog while dissing others'--is that I think he complains specifically about me:

It's my humble opinion that the best blogs--like mine at www.jsonline.com/links/raisingkane --don't rant and rave as much as refer readers to interesting stories and commentary from other sources.

Blogging is best when it's a clearinghouse for ideas rather than a long-winded exercise in self-congratulatory rhetoric.

I mean, if I cut the long-windedness and self-congratulation from my blog, all that would be left is the "Friday Random Ten" and an occasional lazy all-link post or two.

Look, I read blogs because I like the words and opinions of those bloggers, not because I'm looking for linky goodness. To me, bloggers are the "other sources" with "interesting stories." And if he can't see that, he'll remain stuck in his traditional-media (preferred term) world. I will be happy to bring it.

[Others are bringing it, too: See here and here to start.]