Uppity Wisconsin

WTF is going on? As Brittany Zimmerman's death and others like it become a distant memory in our ADD culture, Monday and Tuesday of this week saw two more students violently assaulted just off campus, and no, they were NOT stumbling home late from bars. Students are being pistol whipped and jumped by gangs of juveniles and mugged, when they're not being stabbed.

by Michael Leon

We all have been reading about some spectacular (for Dane County) murder cases recently.

At a preliminary hearing yesterday, the Capital Times reports on: “an emotional day in court Friday as family members and friends of Joel Marino … heard audio tapes that offered the first glimpse of what appears to be limited words spoken during the interaction between the two men that resulted in Marino's death.” 

Accused murderer Adam Peterson, said, in a recorded phone conversation with his father, “I just stabbed him out of nowhere,” reports the Capital Times.

Incomprehensible. Senseless. Unstoppable?

And no comfort for the grief-stricken Marino family.

But I hope that the Madison citizen, John Brodan, who called police about Peterson after spotting him working at Capitol Centre Foods, and making the connection to a sketch of the murder suspect released March 10, gets the $30,000 reward for “information leading to the arrest and conviction of the person or persons responsible for the death of Joel Marino.”

Of course a gun didn't kill people at an Omaha mall, pro-gun groups will tell us.  A crazy person with a gun did it.

And that's true, to a degree.  Jim Rowen, who once covered the firearms issue for the Milwaukee Journal, doubts that a steak knife would have had the same impact.

The weapon in question, Rowen says, was

The SKS is a military weapon that is often called an assault rifle, though because it's not manufactured to fire selectively in single or automatic bursts, it's just a plain old vicious, terribly deadly, non-assault rifle.

A carbine. To the general public, it's an assault rifle because it's military and devastating, and to the dead Nebraskans, it's of no consequence.

Anyway...

There are many SKS variants, having metastasized from the Soviet Union to China and throughout other former Eastern bloc countries, as a cheap, durable deadly, mass-produced and exportable military weapon - - a staple of the world arms trade.

Not with the ugly cachet of the true assault rifle, like an AK-47, but available from Africa to Asia...to southeastern Wisconsin, aina!

The Wisconsin Policy Research Institute's article by John McAdams, defending the huge disparity in incarceration rates for blacks and whites, continues to spark debate.

We wrote about it yesterday, saying that McAdams's findings seemed to suggest a remedy like 40 acres and a mule.

Paul Soglin weighed in with the suggestion that McAdams's approach would also suggest that Milwaukee could tolerate more black murders.

Conservative Rick Esenberg responded to Soglin.

And Soglin offered a rebuttal to Esenberg.

And Esenberg volleys back.

It's an interesting back-and-forth, a much better exchange than the usual name-calling that takes place in the Cheddarsphere.

As every waitress/waiter seems to say these days, "Enjoy!"

Clarke's complete reversal came, as his pronouncements frequently do, in a hysterical email to rabid rightwing radio talker Charlie Sykes, a major Clarke sycophant and publicist.

At the end of a long rant against Gov. Jim Doyle, Mayor Tom Barrett, and Milwaukee aldermen, Clarke says:

If the police are no longer able to guarantee the personal safety of citizens, then reconsider your opposition to allowing law-abiding people the means with which to protect themselves. Yes, Governor, that means carrying concealed handguns.

Clarke calls for veto of concealed weapons bill

Sheriff tells Doyle in letter that change would put deputies in danger

Milwaukee County Sheriff David A. Clarke Jr. on Monday called on Gov. Jim Doyle to veto a bill that would make it easier for Wisconsin residents to carry concealed weapons.

In a letter to Doyle, Clarke says the change called for in the bill would jeopardize the "safety of my deputies and the citizens they represent" and says "there are better ways to fight crime than to flood the streets of Milwaukee with dangerous weapons."

Today, Clarke says the best way to fight crime is to flood the streets of Milwaukee with dangerous weapons.

Rick Esenberg, like John McAdams a member of the Marquette faculty (are there any liberals there?), actually concedes that I may have "a worthy point:"

John McAdams, the professor who holds the endowed Wingnut Chair at Marquette University, has gotten a lot of mileage on the Wisconsin Wingosphere, with his “report” on a hearing held by the Governor's Commission on Reducing Racial Disparities in the Wisconsin Justice System.

As McAdams tells it, the hearing – and probably the commission itself – was a farce.

Here they are, holding a hearing when they already think there is racial disparity in the system, without even waiting for McAdams’s opinion.

And when he gives his apparently compelling testimony: