Precious Milwaukee fluids

Somebody forgot to send the Milwaukee Press Club the press release that many of those concerned about the future of Lake Michigan are not enthusiasts of bottled water. According to OnMilwaukee.com, the Milwaukee Press Club is bottling some Lake Michigan water as a promotional give-away and are actually having a contest to name the bottled water.

The commemorative bottles will be distributed at the City of Milwaukee Birthday Party, Jan. 27, 2009 at Discovery World.

In the meantime, the Press Club wants your help naming the water.

Among the sample name suggestions on the Club's Web site, include "Cream City Clear -- the cream of the crop" and "Wave of the Future - bottled at Milwaukee's well of knowledge."

Former Milwaukee Journal Sentinel writer and now environmental blogger Jim Rowen wrote about the "bottled water loophole" in the Great Lakes Water Compact, "Allowing unlimited diversion of Great Lakes water in plastic containers smaller than 5.7 gallon jugs is hardly a sustainability best-practice." He's not alone as this column in the Toronto Star makes clear.

Let's see, they're looking for a name. How about, "Just a drop in the lake?"

Hearing trains in my sleep

Apparently the sound of inconvenient train whistles will only be temporary, provided the federal government approves the plans. (ht: Spring City Chronicle)

We are going to get the Great Lakes water applications through in plenty of time, right?

These idiots are all wet

It’s been a rough week out there for politicians. I thought that maybe I would spare the usual suspects some embarrassment this week because of Easter. But then the fools came out of the woodwork fast and furious.

Can we start with Senator Barack Obama? Obama’s long time close relationship with the worst embarrassment of a minister since… wowzers. I know the Left has been pointing to some doozies on the Right, but then we’ve heard it all before, haven’t we? How do they like it when we turn it around? Oh, not very much.

It’s not the close relationship with Reverend “God Damn America” Wright that gets the junior senator from the flatlands in trouble. No, it’s the claim he sat there for 20 years in the pews and only heard the good stuff, and then he threw grandma under the bus.

The moral of the story, Grandmas, don’t let your babies grow up to be senators.

Then there was State Representative Jason Fields (Democrat-Milwaukee). Fields was one of ten members of the state legislature who stabbed then-Attorney General Peg Lautenschlager in the back by urging Dane County Executive Kathleen Falk to run for the Democratic nomination. Lautenschlager was consider vulnerable due to a drunk driving conviction in a state car that led to all sorts of questions about her use of state vehicles.

How did that work out, Fields?

This week Fields was himself busted for DUI. Can you say, “irony?” I knew you could.

Fields avoids being the winner by not being stupid even when he was being stupid. He didn’t pull a DYKWIA, and he didn’t claim he was on his way to Madison on official business and therefore should be let go. Warning to legislators, when getting busted for DUI those attempted evasions will move you immediately to the top of the idiots list.

It’s a bi-partisan “idiot politician of the week” this week with State Senator Mary Lazich making a late entry into the contest. In the Small Business Times she claimed eighteen months on a committee studying the issue as credentials as an expert on the proposed Great Lakes Compact, but then turned around and complained the State Senate acted too hastily in passing it and that she didn’t know what the amendments did even two weeks later.

Mary Lazich is apparently not an Evelyn Woods graduate.

Wait a second, it’s a non-partisan contestant for first place! Falling just short is Judge Michael Gableman. If he loses the Supreme Court election to Justice Louis Butler, Gableman can point the finger of blame at an ad attacking Butler for defending a sex offender who then went on and offended again. Missing from the ad was the dull part of the story where Butler was unsuccessful in defending the criminal, the criminal went to jail, served his time, was released, and then decided to re-offend.

The Gableman campaign had to know the ad was going to be controversial and compared to the Willie Horton ad (it was). The campaign could’ve weathered that. But they omitted the most important details from the story that made it clear nothing that happened was Butler’s fault. Not surprisingly, Gableman got clubbed like a baby seal by both the left and the right. He then compounded the problem by getting into a dispute over releasing his e-mails with the Associated Press. It was not a good week for the judge.

But there’s something in the whitewater of Whitewater, WI, home to Police Chief James Coan and City Manager Kevin Brunner, that’s really detrimental to the collective IQ. Coan, with Brunner’s backing, is using taxpayer resources and the power of the police to pursue pseudonymous blogger John Adams, author of FreeWhitewater.com. In another community, Brunner and Coan would be thrown out of office for such behavior. That there isn’t a recall effort yet shows the need for more people in Whitewater to speak out and defend free speech. So while they may cling to their little fiefdom, Brunner and Coan have become laughingstocks in the rest of the state and this week’s Idiot Politicians of the Week.

Compact argument

State Senator Mary Lazich has an article in the Small Business Times that explains her vote against the Great Lakes Compact. Lazich gives two reasons: the speed with which the Senate passed it (with 33 amendments on the implementation) and the single-governor veto.

Lazich herself points out that she sat on a committee that looked at the proposed Great Lakes Compact for a year and a half as a way of demonstrating her expertise on the subject. After eighteen months even a slow reader should be able to cite every phrase and comma and footnote in the Compact. To complain about the number of amendments thrown in at the last minute is really to do herself a disservice. Surely Lazich could have turned to her colleagues as each amendment was introduced (even at lightning speed) and said which were the good, the bad and the ugly. That Lazich still cannot point to a single flaw in any of the amendments that would have been fatal to her support even two weeks after they were passed.

As for the single-governor veto, this is an issue which we've discussed here before. But Lazich helps my case, even as she argues against it.

To relinquish our sovereignty to a regional body of governors that can make changes after the compact is adopted is unacceptable. Where else do we have a dictatorial or totalitarian form of government where we give up our decision-making authority?

I do not support a document that relinquishes our sovereignty to another state.

Aside from the misuse of the terms "dictatorial or totalitarian", she does inadvertently find the key to the debate: no state will willingly yield it's sovereignty over the Great Lakes. But Lazich will have a hard convincing any state that it should yield such sovereignty to a majority vote, especially when under current federal law they already have absolute sovereignty - the veto power to which she objects. Does she think that Wisconsin will maintain an absolute veto, but that other states will yield theirs?

More importantly, why should Wisconsin want to yield it's power over diversions from the Great Lakes to a majority vote of other states?

Finally, after 18 months of committee time, two weeks after the vote, despite Lazich's assurance it is so, nobody has stepped forward and said what is so objectionable about the proposed compact that doesn't already exist in current law. Someone with the extensive time spent on this issue Lazich claims as the basis of her expertise should be able to find some flaw in the pact and articulate it, or else she should concede that she is opposed to any compact.

I'm going to need more hose

Owen Robinson celebrates the state assembly's failure to pass the Great Lakes Water Compact during the most recent session.

Good.

The Republican majority in the state Assembly tonight blocked an effort by Democrats to hold a vote on the Great Lakes compact.

There is no reason that Wisconsin should surrender its water policy to the neighboring states, who have no interest in Wisconsin’s well being.

I agree. Iowa should have absolutely no say in the water coming from Lake Michigan. Screw 'em.

However, since we kinda share the Great Lakes with a bunch of other states, we're kinda stuck with sharing the decision making. It's not like we can say we'll give this part of Lake Michigan and Lake Superior to Wisconsin, this part of Lake Superior to Minnesota, this part of the Great Lakes to Michigan, etc. It's one big interdependent freshwater system with the state of Michigan in the middle.

To mask this as an issue of a state's sovereignty over it's resources is just silly. (What are we going to do? "Fresh water or fight! Manifest Destiny for Wisconsin! Knock those UP'ers right in the lake!") Even if we could have Senator Mary Lazich's dream of no controlling authority over the lakes we would be faced with a long-term losing proposition. Doesn't anyone remember the "tragedy of the commons"? What do Lazich and Huebsch think is going to happen with unlimited straws in the drink?

Unfortunately for Lazich and Huebsch and Robinson and the Waukesha Chamber of Commerce, even if they could convince themselves some anarchic utopia is possible, current law won't allow it. D'oh!

Current law allows each state veto authority over any diversion from the lakes. Unlike what life would be under the compact, there would be no defined criteria for a diversion. There would be no process. It would be at the capricious whim of each of the Great Lakes governors. Don't trust Michigan now? Why would you feel better if they didn't have to justify their veto?

Now I'm not going to lose any sleep over the state assembly not taking up the Compact because there's going to be a special session, etc. And seriously, a couple of weeks or even a couple of months isn't going to make much difference except wear down the opposition. I suspect that some of the screams of partisanship about the Great Lakes Compact are really just partisan ploys themselves. (Republicans bad. Republicans want Great Lakes to be Arizona's bath tub. yadda yadda yadda.) Besides, a delay keeps Jim Rowen busy and out of trouble.

And in the meantime, Owen Robinson has promised everyone in Waukesha we can borrow some of his radium-free drinking water. We'll just need to run a hose to his house in West Bend and help ourselves to as much as we want. Who has got a Fleet Farm charge card to buy a really big hose?