Category: Politics

Water Wars: The State of the San Joaquin River

Posted on by

As the water wars arrive in Wisconsin, it’s useful to take a look at what has happened in other parts of the United States. Juliana Barbassa does just that in California’s Ansel Adams Wilderness Area:

It begins as fresh snowmelt, streaming from Mount Ritter’s gray granite faces into Thousand Island Lake, a bouldered mirror. The clear blue water spills out through a narrow canyon, and the San Joaquin River is born.

When conservationist and mountaineer John Muir first explored these upper reaches, the narrow gorge barely contained the power of the living river, which carried the continent’s southernmost salmon run, sustained Indian tribes and set the rhythm of life in the valley below with floods and droughts.

“Certainly this Joaquin Canyon is the most remarkable in many ways of all I have entered,” Muir wrote in 1873.

Dutch Treat: Personal Database from Cradle to Grave

Posted on by

AP:

The Dutch government will begin tracking every citizen from cradle to grave in a single database, opening a personal electronic dossier for every child at birth with health and family data, and eventually adding school and police records.

As a privacy safeguard, no single person will be able to access someone’s entire file. And each agency that contributes to the records will maintain its own files as well.

But organizations can raise “red flags” in the dossier to caution other agencies of potential problems with children, said ministry spokesman Jan Brouwer. Until now, schools and police have been unable to communicate with each other about truancy records and criminality, which are often linked.

Farmers Market Activism

Posted on by

Nancy suggested that I summarize some of the activists present at this morning’s Dane County Farmer’s Market. The observation of those leafletting the Market’s four corners provides an interesting glimpse into the City’s political thinking. Today’s leaflets included:

  • Uncompromising Courage, an exhibit of Falun Gong Art at the State Capitol Rotunda through 10/9/2005. The backside included a link to the Epoch Times and a wish that the Chinese Communist Party might collapse soon.
  • The Madison Rep was actively promoting their New Play Festival which runs from 9.17 to 9.25.
  • A Pro Madison Bar Smoking Ban Group was active across from L’etoile

The Changing Value of Shakespeare

Posted on by

Tyler Cowen takes a quick look at William St. Clair’s new book: The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period. This book, so interesting on many levels looks at:

During the four centuries when printed paper was the only means by which texts could be carried across time and distance, everyone engaged in politics, education, religion, and literature believed that reading helped to shape the minds, opinions, attitudes, and ultimately the actions, of readers. William St Clair investigates how the national culture can be understood through a quantitative study of the books that were actually read. Centred on the romantic period in the English-speaking world, but ranging across the whole print era, it reaches startling conclusions about the forces that determined how ideas were carried, through print, into wider society. St Clair provides an in-depth investigation of information, made available here for the first time, on prices, print runs, intellectual property, and readerships gathered from over fifty publishing and printing archives. He offers a picture of the past very different from those presented by traditional approaches. Indispensable to students, English literature, book history, and the history of ideas, the study’s conclusions and explanatory models are highly relevant to the issues we face in the age of the internet.

  • The first study of actual reading using quantification and economic analysis
  • Sheds new light on aspects of reading and its effect on the nation
  • An indispensable resource for scholars working on literature, reading, and the history of publishing and printing

LAB: Wisconsin Voter Registration Evaluation

Posted on by

Wisconsin Legislative Audit Bureau [PDF]:

We found that statutory requirements are not consistently followed. Among our survey respondents:

  • only 85.3 percent of municipalities removed the names of inactive voters from their voter registration lists;
  • only 71.4 percent sometimes or always notified registered voters before removing their names; and
  • only 54.0 percent reported removing the names of ineligible felons.

Because of such inconsistencies, registration lists contain duplicate records and the names of ineligible individuals. For example, when
we reviewed more than 348,000 electronic voter registration records from eight municipalities, we identified 3,116 records that appear to show individuals who are registered more than once in the same municipality.

Greg Borowski and Stacy Forster have more:

Among the 348,000 electronic voter registration records checked were 105 potentially improper or fraudulent votes including:

  • Ballots cast by 98 ineligible felons, including 57 in Madison.
  • Two people who appear to have voted twice.
  • Four cases of voters whose absentee ballots were included in official election results even though they died in the two weeks before the election.
  • One instance of a 17-year-old in Madison who apparently voted.

Marotta Moves On and Leaves a Few Comments Behind

Posted on by

Governor Doyle’s top aide, Marc Marotta offered up a few comments as he left that post for private law practice (and help raise money for Doyle’s re-election campaign).

*Although Marotta said he found “a lot of good, dedicated” employees in state government, he said the most frustrating part of his job was the “tremendous inertia” that buries every decision — large and small — in bureaucratic quicksand. “Every little issue has its own political world,” he added.

A Bit of Cold War Reading from the CIA: Tolkachev

Posted on by

Barry G. Royden:

On 20 September 1985, international wire service reports carried a statement distributed by the official Soviet news agency TASS that one A. G. Tolkachev, whom it described as a staff member at one of Moscow’s research institutes, had been arrested the previous June trying to pass secret materials of a defensive nature to the United States. Subsequent news stories said Tolkachev was an electronics expert at a military aviation institute in Moscow who was compromised by former CIA officer Edward Lee Howard.

In October 1985, The Washington Post ran a story that described Tolkachev as “one of CIA’s most valuable human assets in the Soviet Union.” According to FBI affidavits related to the Howard espionage case that were made public, Tolkachev had provided information on Soviet avionics, cruise missiles, and other technologies. The Soviets subsequently publicly confirmed that they had executed Tolkachev in 1986 for “high treason.”

Fascinating and well worth reading.

The Squeezing of Lawyer/Client Privilege

Posted on by

Jonathan D. Glater:

Prosecutors say that they usually do not seek to learn what advice a lawyer provides to a client, but are trying only to learn the facts. In an interview in 2003, James B. Comey, a former United States attorney, said, “They are just seeking the facts, including factual attorney work product.” Lawyers for former KPMG partners have already excoriated the firm’s cooperation and, in particular, its acknowledgment of wrongdoing, contending that the firm did not undertake a thorough internal investigation to justify such a statement. (The statement is unlikely to be admitted in evidence in the criminal case against the former partners, though, lawyers said, and, in any event, it does not identify specific wrongdoers.)