Snorting Coke Near the President

How disrespectful to the office of the president.

Fact: David Cross once snorted cocaine at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

The actor confessed to the persistent rumor in an interview in the March issue of Playboy magazine, saying he pulled the stunt while sitting some 65 feet away from President Obama.

“It wasn’t even that much cocaine. It was literally the size of, I don’t know, a tick. It was a tiny granule of coke that I put on my wrist and said, ‘Watch this. I need a witness,’” Cross recalled.

“And then I ducked under the table and did it. It wasn’t like I got high,” he continued. “The jolt was similar to licking an empty espresso cup. It wasn’t about that. It was just about being able to say that I did it, that I did cocaine in the same room as the president.”

No Issues with Voter ID

Gee, whodathunk that almost everyone has a picture ID and carries it with them?

Local election officials reported no problems enforcing the new law as people in about 520 of Wisconsin’s 1,850 cities, villages and towns voted on local races. In Dane County, they cast ballots in a judicial primary, while some also winnowed the candidates for two County Board seats and weighed in on a school referendum.

Fitzgerald Strong

Nice ad.

West Bend School District Budget Proposal

This doesn’t looks good.

Neitzke said he will be recommending one cut – that school fees be reduced by about 50 percent

[...]

Neitzke said he will also be proposing the district ask the community to approve the highest allowable tax levy at the district’s annual meeting on Sept. 24.

So let me get this straight… they’ll cut fees by 50% for the people who are direct beneficiaries of the district and compensate for that by taxing every taxpayer in the district to the maximum level possible? It sounds like Neitzke is taking a sheet from his predecessor’s book of budgeting.

I’ve asked for the budget proposal and will provide more detail when I receive it.

Poll Watcher

I heard there was a NAACP poll watcher at the West Bend Library today. I suspect it was looking for some poor person being “disenfranchised” by the new voter ID law. I wonder if they

fabricated

found anything.

Becker Wins

The folks in district 2 of Washington County did a great job! Here are the results:

Dave Krochalk - 59 - 12.74%
Jim Becker - 203 - 43.84%
Herbert J. Tennies - 199 - 42.98%
Write-in Votes - 2 - 0.43%

Off to the general election with Becker in the lead and Tennies, the incumbent, a close second. It looks like DIstrict 2 is ready for a change.

Man Charged for Warning Shot

“Live free or die” my ass.

A New Hampshire man who fired his handgun into the ground to scare an alleged burglar he caught crawling out of a neighbor’s window is now facing a felony charge—and the same potential prison sentence as the man he stopped.

Dennis Fleming, 61, of Farmington, was arrested for reckless conduct after the Saturday incident at his 19th century farmhouse. The single grandfather had returned home to find that his home had been burglarized and spotted Joseph Hebert, 27, climbing out of a window at a neighbor’s home. Fleming said he yelled “Freeze!” before firing his gun into the ground, then held Hebert at gunpoint until police arrived.

“I didn’t think I could handle this guy physically, so I fired into the ground,” Fleming told FoxNews.com. “He stopped. He knew I was serious. I was angry … and I was worried that this guy was going to come after me.”

No one was injured in the incident, but when the police arrived, they made two arrests. Hebert was charged with two counts of burglary and drug possession. He faces up to seven years in prison if convicted. Fleming, meanwhile, is scheduled to be arraigned March 20 on a charge of reckless conduct, which could potentially land him a sentence similar to the one Hebert faces.

The grandpa shouldn’t have fired his weapon. There’s really no such thing as a “warning shot.” If you shoot, it better be because you are in fear of your (or someone else’s) life and intend to stop the threat. But his actions were certainly not irrational or reckless. They were deliberate and had the positive outcome of capturing a criminal. At the most, the grandpa should get a light slap on the wrist. Ideally, he should get a stear lecture from the cops and a “thank you” for looking out for his neighbors.

NEA Planning Massive Layoff

Well, well... those union rules are a pain, eh?

It is a measure of how serious the situation is that NEA executives see severe staff reductions as their only remaining option. NEA employees have been presented with an “exit program,” which is essentially an early retirement incentive. About 124 NEA staffers (out of about 580) are eligible to retire. The union is offering an additional 10 weeks of severance pay if they submit their paperwork by March 15. Most NEA employees are already guaranteed one week of severance pay for each year employed, up to 10.

The union is banking heavily on staffers accepting the offer, as “immediate” reductions in force and layoffs are the alternative. But there’s a problem.

Union “management” and confidential assistants may be dismissed right away, but most NEA employees are themselves members of unions, known as staff unions. And NEA is unable to lay off staff union members without 60 days of bargaining to come up with alternative measures. If no agreement is reached and NEA decides to go ahead with layoffs, the affected employees receive an additional 30 days notice. That means the school year will be over before the payroll can be reduced.

Hat tip Wis U.P. North.

Shame, shame, shame

My column for the Daily News is online. It’s called, “Shame, shame, shame.”

Vote Becker

If you live in District 2 of Washington County, get off your arse and vote for Becker. Here’s the district:

CTA to Auction Off One-Third of Inventory

Wow. That’s efficiency for you.

As part of the initiative to cut costs and increase efficiency, the CTA plans to auction off about one-third of its total inventory of unused parts and supplies in late spring, officials said. It will also hire a qualified company to manage inventory, they said.

[...]

Almost half of the CTA’s total supplies have not been moved in the past year and are worth about $32 million, officials said.

One aisle at the main warehouse contains more than 4,800 decade-old items worth about $6 million, officials said. Another section boasts about 80 outdated bus heaters, worth about $174,344, that were ordered in 2006 but became useless when the CTA switched to newer models of buses.

The items, some of which have sat on shelves for 10 years, have accumulated in CTA warehouses due to poor inventory management and an ineffective tracking system, both problems officials are trying to solve, Claypool said. Large multiple orders in 2008, for example, resulted in a 25-year supply of window films, valued at $109,755.

Stache Act

I can get behind this.

Standing before a small crowd of supporters and tourists who, curious,  had ambled toward the pro-mustache music blaring from his stage on the U.S. Capitol’s West Lawn, the American Mustache Institute chairman also rolled out the “Stache Act,” a bill that would provide a $250 tax credit to mustached Americans. Perlut touted the support of tax giant H&R Block, which really did agree to support the endeavor.

“According to AMI science, we’ve increased mustache growth and thus good looks by 38 percent in this country. But those good looks came at a cost in the form of American-made facial grooming products such as beard and mustache trimmers, facial hair dyes, karate training devices, mayonnaise and dynamite. Indeed, those accoutrements are not free,” Perlut said.

“It is clear that mustache maintenance costs qualify and should be considered a deductible expense related to the production of income underneath Internal Revenue Service Code Section 212, and, hence, the Million Mustache March.”

Germantown School Board Primary

There’s a school board race in Germantown tomorrow. John Washburn sums it up well:

The primary is for 3 people vying for the open seat vacated by Kim Fischer. The candidates are:

Sarah Larson
Christina Wolf-Lang, and
Lisa Laskowski

If you want the budget of the Germantown School to balloon with little or no limits, then vote for people in the reverse order listed. If you would like Act 10 tools applied to the Germantown school district budget, then vote for the candidate in the order listed.

In short:

Spendthrift = Laskowski
Act 10 Implementor = Sarah Larson

Holloway Throws Down the Race Card

Because that’s what he does.

In your column this morning, I am particularly concerned that you chose the phrase “oversized personality” to describe me. It’s unfortunate that some people are not open to having black individuals in strong leadership positions. Your message undoubtedly will be perceived as “black man, stay in your place.”

I dream of a day when a white man can openly call a black man a jerk without being accused of racism.

Will Barrett Run?

He must not have gotten the memo from AFSCME and WEAC.

Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett said although he’s currently focusing on his mayoral re-election campaign, he’s still “seriously considering” running for governor in a likely recall election of Gov. Scott Walker.

Or he just enjoys the attention of people constantly asking him.