Wisconsin RTA bill to pass Assembly committee, then Assembly… and what of the state Senate?

Word from Rep. Christine Sinicki is that the Assembly RTA bill will pass committee tomorrow, and should pass the Assembly as well.

The real trick, apparently, will be to get it passed in the state Senate. Sen. Jeff Plale, who represents me, sent me a letter saying he’s co=sponsored an RTA bill. (I don’t have it handy or else I’d cite it.) Figuring that the senators from the eastern parts of Milwaukee County will vote in favor, senators and representatives from the western region of the counties may have a disproportionate influence on the bill. Eastern Racine County seems to be in favor of it, while the western portion of Racine County wants nothing to do with it. If only we could magically divide Kenosha, Racine, and Milwaukee Counties along a narrow east-west divide, we’d have it sewn up. Only, it doesn’t work that way.

More soon.

Raise 100 phone calls in support of transit, and this guy will shave his head

Yup! Steve Glynn from Spreenkler will shave his head—and we’ll get a free lunch at Transfer Pizzeria—if we make the calls for transit!

Details at Launch Milwaukee.

Dude. Free lunch at Transfer? I’m calling my reps!

[HideHouseGarden] Access to Water: Applied for.

From the Bay View Hide House Community Garden blog:

Q: What’s a community garden without access to water?

A: An empty lot.

Generally speaking, it’s a good thing that we live in a civilization. And for good or for bad, you know you live in a civilization when you have to apply to get access to water.

Today, the process of of applying to get water through the city has come to a successful conclusion. (At least so far.) That said, figuring out exactly who to talk to took a bit of doing. To make the long story short, if you have a legitimate project such as a community garden, it can be done fairly easily. If you’re starting a garden, we can tell you who to talk to. Just ask!

President Obama announces new nuclear weapons treaty with Russia

It gives me a great pleasure to say that President Obama has announced what hopefully will be the first of many new nuclear weapons treaties with Russia. Indeed, he has referred to it as “a new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty [START],” a direct continuance of the recently expired START treaty.

According to the President’s statement, “the new START Treaty makes progress in several areas. It cuts – by about a third – the nuclear weapons that the United States and Russia will deploy. It significantly reduces missiles and launchers. It puts in place a strong and effective verification regime. And it maintains the flexibility that we need to protect and advance our national security, and to guarantee our unwavering commitment to the security of our Allies.”

It specifically does not address the missile defense systems that are still being deployed. I know Russia has a lot of anxiety about that. And personally, I don’t think they work for anything except wasting a lot of money. Do people that were not deficit hawks until two months ago have anything to say about that?

Bravo to President Obama for having the foresight and persistence to get this through. Note that it was announced just days after the health insurance reform act was signed into law. That says a lot about his presence of mind and ability to really get stuff done. Bravo, Mr. President.

Who knew, TOMMY! likes ObamaCare?

In principle, anyway, our dear former governor and tax-imposer  TOMMY! Thompson said that he digs it. The former Bush secretary is quoted saying that very thing in the Miami Herald:

Seeking to deradicalize the idea during a symposium in Orlando in September 2008, Thompson said, “Just like people are required to have car insurance, they could be required to have health insurance.”

The article also points out that the mandated insurance is “a Republican idea,” much like the one former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney got passed in the state.

But naturally, since it’s a president from the Democratic Party proposing it, it’s creeping marxism. Although the huge benefit to the insurance industry assures quite the opposite net effect of anything that could be considered even vaguely marxist. Remember, marxist belief systems are centered around people, not corporations, being in control of and receiving benefit from the government. So then, what Obama passed was “marxist,” yet what Romney passed to much the same effect was not marxist. And Tommy wants the same allegedly marxist thing.

(Confused yet? I think they want it that way.)

TOMMY!

While I for one really wanted insurance companies to be able to indefinitely continue raising rates and denying life-saving services—your sarcastic-bullshit detectors should be flashing now—the health insurance reforms passed by Congress and signed into law by President Obama forbid that. I’d love to see TOMMY! try and back away from his previous statement about it. Heck, I wonder what lobbying he did to help the insurance industry get a fatter check from the bill? He’s good for that sort of thing nowadays, benefiting industry at the expense of the people.

Also: Zach W. makes it clear that TOMMY! was for it before he was against it. Even if it was worth spending billions of dollars to set it up universal care for Iraq. I kid you not: “Universal care is right for Iraq, Thompson says” was a headline in the Seattle Times. See it for yourself!

And yet, we can’t have it here…

Nuclear arms treaty would be Obama’s second great accompishment

I remember the year 1987 as being one of particularly heady days for me. While I had no idea that my life was going to head south for a while, literally and figuratively, I had started to become well aware of the international tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union. About five years earlier while on a Boy Scout trip to an air base somewhere in Michigan, I asked a man in uniform, “Any commies up there?” He laughed and said, “No, no commies up there.” I didn’t have any idea what that really meant, other than commies were bad.

Twenty years later, as a slightly learned historian of the Cold War, I have perhaps a more nuanced perspective on Soviet Union and communism. Don’t read that to mean that I’m a fan of communism. I’m certainly not. I know a bit of what Leninist-Stalinist communism did to Russia and Eastern Europe, and it’s interesting to watch how it continues to evolve in China. How it affected American attitudes and ideas about the world is another subject altogether.

That said, I do recall the joy I felt in 1987 when President Reagan and Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. I had been having nightmares about nuclear war, partially due to my study of nuclear weapons using information available in my grade school library. Hearing that Reagan and Gorbachev were going to meet peacefully was very reassuring. After the signing, both were seen as heroes in the United States—especially Gorbachev, who attained a celebrity status. (Remember the ad he was in for Pizza Hut? The dialog between the people in the restaurant about “being on the edge of economic ruin” because of Gorbie is frighteningly true.)

. According to Atomic Archive, the INF treaty “resulted in the elimination of 846 U.S. INF missile systems and 1,846 Soviet INF missile systems [a total of 2,692 missiles]… The INF treaty is the first nuclear arms control agreement to actually reduce nuclear arms, rather than establish ceilings.”

In 2010, talk of nuclear weapons is a distant thought for many. That said, we still have thousands of nukes ready for use. So it has been very encouraging to hear word that President Obama and Russian President Dmitri A. Medvedev, have been drawing closer and closer to signing a new treaty. The New York Times reports that roadblocks towards having a treaty have been overcome, and a new treaty should be ready by April. It apparently would be signed at a summit in Prague.

Creating a binding nuclear weapons treaty and being able to negotiate its terms with Russia is no small task. When a new treaty is signed, President Obama will have achieved a second and very significant accomplishment.

Getting the HCR vote on

At last month’s Drinking Liberally, I told one guest that we’d be seeing something soon on health care. As in, a vote.

About two weeks ago in the New York Times, Rep. Pelosi said that would be a vote within ten days. She’s on C-SPAN right now, in the lead up to the vote itself. I agree with what she’s saying about how having the law in place will be pro-entrepreneurial. It really is. I’m a bit of a serial entrepreneur, and the need for health insurance has been a big damper on that instinct.

But now, an imperfect bill is about to happen.

It ain’t perfect. It ain’t purty. The sausage-making of democracy rarely is.

It’s going to happen. If you think it’s worth rioting in the streets over, well, go for it. If you want your insurance company to be able to preemptively raise your rates or drop you from coverage… well, I’m not sure what your options will be once this goes into effect. (In 2014. Bah.)

We will not be reduced to a “socialist” hell because of it.

Congratulations, Mr. President, and to all the people with the courage to vote affirmatively for the bill.

We’ve been in Iraq for seven years.

My daughter was about six months old when we joined much of the world in marching in protest of the Bush administration’s war plans.

My daughter, now age seven, has never known her country to not be at war.

Seven years, tens of thousands of dead people—American, British, Spanish, and especially Iraqi people—and hundreds of billions of debt.

For what?

Don’t answer that.

Remembering Joseph Zilber

Word of the passing of real estate developer and philanthropist Joseph Zilber came over the airwaves and Internets today. Few people have ever spoken so eloquently about what needs to happen to make Milwaukee into the truly great city that we know that it can be as did Mr. Zilber. His vision went beyond making huge and very directly effective donations, such as his 2007 gift of $30 million to Marquette University’s law school. Zilber knew that Milwaukee is a city of neighborhoods, and that renewing and improving the neighborhoods is key to to building a thriving city.

My wife pointed out these lines from the Journal Sentinel story on Zilber’s passing:

Zilber had suffered bouts of pneumonia during the past year and spent much of the time at his home in Hawaii.

“But he wanted to come back to Milwaukee,” said Michael P. Mervis, vice president of Zilber Ltd., who announced Zilber’s death Friday.

On Monday Zilber flew back here because he said he wanted to attend a company meeting that’s planned for next week, Mervis said.

Later in the week, he entered the Zilber Hospice in Wauwatosa, which he built in 2004, and was talking with old friends, Mervis said.

Zilber died at the hospice Friday morning.

As she wrote, “This is a guy who lived, breathed, and died Milwaukee.”

True indeed. He grew up on N. 9th Street, an area that is now likely non-existent or within a stone’s throw of I-43. Despite the city likely having destroyed his childhood home with the foolish decision to run the freeway through the heart of so many neighborhoods, Zilber devoted his final years to a quest to revive Milwaukee. I agree with much of what he said in this 2007 interview with WUWM: it’s going to take a great rebuilding of the social infrastructures, the education system, and a revitalization of its complex ethnic makeup. It’s a huge effort, and a huge investment. But there are few things in my life that I believe in more than the possibility of raising Milwaukee to be the shining city I know it can be.

Joseph Zilber saw it, too.

Rest in peace, dear sir. And thank you.

One by one they all line up

This time, it appears, not to take a fall.