"I would suggest that we not worry about funding."

"In other words: Design the best programs possible. Then we’ll worry about funding them."

The quote is from Madison Mayor Paul Soglin, and the issue is "the achievement gap" in Madison schools. Soglin has suggested "expanding access to nutritious food outside of school, supporting transportation for students and parents, and increasing the amount of time children spend in learning environments."

Increasing the amount of time children spend in learning environments sounds like a polite way of saying keep them away from their parents as much as possible.

You may be able to look out your downtown Madison window and see Barack Obama and Bruce Springsteen, but don't you dare.

"The counter terrorism teams have to be cognizant of movement in windows for obvious reasons... Please cooperate with their needs and stay away from those windows. We, too, would like to watch, but we need to avoid the urge."

Yeah, when Obama appeared right outside my office window — just a few weeks ago — I got email telling me that if I looked out my window I could expect a visit from the police. Then they just shut down the whole law school building for the entire day and closed all the blinds. They hung a giant building-sized curtain all down one side of a dorm that had a view of the central mall where the President appeared.

And now he's coming back to the City of Obama Love — Madison, Wisconsin — to create a final burst of glowing adoration on the morning before Election Day, and our town is thrown into disarray once again for photo-op purposes, because we are the fresh-faced folk who still gaze upon him with awe. There are the young people — whose professors will undoubtedly free them from classes once again — and the aging liberals — who will surely feel the pull of the lugubrious dronings of Mr. Springsteen.

City employees have also been warned. "Offices facing MLK Jr., Blvd. and Wilson Street will need to be locked and vacant with the blinds drawn," Mayor Paul Soglin wrote in an email Friday afternoon to staff and city alders. "Adherence to this directive is imperative as the health and safety of our employees may be negatively impacted if we fail to enforce this directive," he added.

Adherence to this directive is imperative as the health and safety of our employees may be negatively impacted if we fail to enforce this directive.... jeez, he's talking like a robot! What are they threatening to do to us if we look out a window? Negatively impact us....

We're told the city streets downtown will begin closing Sunday morning, a full day before the appearance. People are asked to amass at the top of State Street and form 2 lines which will proceed in opposite directions around the Capitol Square to the site of the rally (which is right in front of the City-County Building, the place you go to early-vote). Picture all 4 sides of the Capitol Square streaming with political people. A fabulous photo-op, which might remind us of the big Wisconsin protests of 2011 — you know, those anti-Scott Walker demonstrations which Barack Obama steered way clear of. He wasn't there for the demonstrations or to boost Walker's opponent in the recall election last spring. Obama wasn't there for the Madison lefty-liberals when they needed him, but they'll be there — presumably! — when he needs them.

Given the hasty plans for the rally, Lindskoog [a downtown parking manager] is anticipating gridlock and scarce parking will greet anyone who ventures downtown after 6 a.m. Monday. The crowd, he says, is anticipated to hit 50,000.

"We're hoping people treat this like a snow day," he said with a laugh.

Ha ha. Like a snow day. Like some sort of natural disaster that shuts a city down. That's always so fun. And don't come downtown, anybody, because it will be a nightmare, but be sure to come downtown, everybody, because there's a fabulous festival unreeling in our town again, our town, the President's favorite town, where he loves the way you love him. Now, smile for the cameras, Madison people. You're the chosen scenery once again!

Who gets free school dinner in Madison, Wisconsin?

"Unlike the lunch program, eligibility for a free dinner is based on whether the school qualifies for the program based on school poverty rates, rather than the income level of an individual student. So any student participating in an eligible after-school program can eat the dinner meal for free."

Eligible schools for the dinner program must have at least 50 percent of students qualify as low-income. In Madison last year, 18 elementary schools, seven middle schools and East and La Follette High schools met that requirement.

To be eligible, students must take part in an academically focused after-school program, not an after-school sport. Memorial is looking into setting up a homework club for athletes between practice and the free meal so that they can participate in the free meal.

So, in this affluent city, we are nevertheless so poor, that the federal government is subsidizing free dinner at 18 elementary schools, 7 middle schools, and 2 of the 4 high schools. And it doesn't matter how much money your parents make, you get free dinner if you go to that school and do an after school activity... as long as your activity is not sports.

Yeah, that makes so much sense. What's with discriminating against the students who, after sitting at desks all day, choose a physically active after-school activity? Aren't they more in need of food? What's the connection between this policy and fighting obesity?

"This progressive city is way behind other cities in that regard," [Mayor Paul] Soglin said. "We should not look at this as a frill, or as an experiment, but something citywide."

This is not a frill. It's an imperative... within the progressive agenda... which seems to have to do with increasing dependency of government and inspiring the young to look to the authorities as their nurturing, nourishing mothers.

Is a mobile fresh-fruits-and-veggies vendor in a city's so-called "food desert" a good idea?

Madison is full of grocery stores, but it has a neighborhood that that the U.S. Department of Agriculture has labeled a "food desert," because there's no grocery store within walking distance. There was one, but it closed, for whatever reason. I'd imagine most people drove to that one anyway, but now the people in the area have to drive (or bike?) to do their grocery shopping. So now the owner of a campus area grocery story comes up with the idea of "a grocery store on wheels called the Freshmobile."

Something like this...



... but with a jaunty instrumental version of this. And you can just picture the desert dwellers running after it waving dollar bills, can't you?

Ald. Brian Solomon, 10th District, represents the Allied Drive neighborhood [says] “I know a lot of people in Allied that want to eat healthy food, they just don’t have access to it"...

According to Mayor Paul Soglin, the city’s vending ordinances are “not designed to encourage this kind of activity.”

But they're changing the ordinances. And the Freshmobile guy (Jeff Mauer) has "raised most of the $125,000 needed to buy the trailer, truck and equipment thanks to grants from local foundations and donations." So Mauer has all this free publicity for his downtown grocery store, people are changing laws for him, and giving him thousands of dollars to tool around town in a mobile billboard for his business... which will presumably make it all the more unfeasible for a real grocery store to want to open in the area where the old one closed.

[Mauer] said the nonprofit Freshmobile Initiative can provide low overhead costs that would help keep food prices low.

You have to know how to work the "green" liberal minds of Madison, Wisconsin. Throw enough buzzwords at them — nonprofit, under-served, affordable, access — and no one will think about your carbon footprint.

Ousted from the Don Miller parking lot, where will Occupy Madison go?

Cap Times reports — in an article that says it was posted at 2:45 pm yesterday:

“It was an intolerable situation,” Mayor Paul Soglin said Monday evening of the Occupy Madison homeless encampment on East Washington Avenue, after a Dane County judge declined to issue a temporary restraining order to prevent the city from closing it down.

It's so annoying to try to follow the news from this once-halfway-decent newspaper. I almost passed up this article because I wanted to know what happened last night. But here's the news from Monday night, posted mid-afternoon on Monday.

“The kind of health issues and crime problems we had on this site are not covered by the First Amendment, I think that’s very clear,” Soglin said. 

He said that the city would wait until noon Tuesday to evacuate the site, to give people a chance to pack their things and leave. 

Police calls to the Occupy site at a city-owned former car dealership in the 800 block of East Washington Avenue included some serious incidents, Soglin stressed. “We are treating the site as a hazardous waste site -- no employee going in is going to touch anything. We’ve had numerous reports of needles.”

Why was this allowed to go on so long?

About an hour earlier...

Earlier than what? "Monday evening"?

... Dane County Circuit Court Judge Amy Smith told pro-bono lawyers who sought a temporary restraining order in the name of three homeless people that they had not provided convincing evidence that clearing the site would trample the occupants’ First Amendment rights of assembly and free speech. In fact, there was evidence that occupants had participated in protests at other locations in the city while living at Occupy Madison, Smith pointed out.

Oh, good lord, why was this a difficult issue? The protesters have left the city with a hazardous waste site to clean up and they made us waste our scarce money defending ridiculous lawsuits. You know the old lefty slogan "Property is theft." These lefties have me thinking: Protest is theft.

At about the time that Soglin spoke with reporters at a community budget session at Wright Middle School on the south side about a dozen protesters gathered in the hallway outside Soglin’s office in the City-County Building downtown were ordered to leave by police officers. All but one man -- Allen Barkoff, 69 -- obeyed; he was arrested and charged with trespassing.

Barkoff — we were talking about him yesterday.

What was the point of all the patience and tolerance? At some point, it would need to end and it would, predictably, end badly. Now, they've got until noon today, and then the city moves in. Brilliantly, the day is May 1st, which has long been planned as a big protest day. I can see in the social media that there's an effort to draw a crowd to the Occupy site at noon (and then to march to the City County Building for a rally). Good luck to Mayor Soglin — who's now the protesters' enemy. (We saw a "Recall Soglin" sign at the Occupy site yesterday. Another sign said: "We were evicted from our homes, Mayor Soglin.)

ADDED: Here's what we saw:

"Look, if it helps, I'll take my share of the blame for last year's mess."

"I'm not sure if the bad stuff would have happened if it hadn't been for the transition between myself and the incoming mayor. Paul Soglin was legitimately focused on other more demanding issues and I was busy looking for more bubble wrap and packing boxes."

Whoa! Mayor Dave takes the blame... and shifts it.

Madison's Mayor Soglin talks about letting nonprofit property owners make voluntary payments instead of taxes.

Voluntary payments? We were just talking about that in the previous post! Who makes charitable contributions to the government? What is Paul Soglin talking about?

Such a program, which would likely exempt smaller nonprofits, could produce several million dollars in annual revenue as service costs rise, state financial support remains unpredictable, and political pressures and changes in state law limit the city's capacity to increase taxes.

This is about bringing in new money, not switching current taxpayers into an optional approach.

The city has roughly 73,800 parcels valued at $21.5 billion, said Dave Gawenda, city treasurer. That includes 1,201 exempt parcels — excluding city, Dane County and Madison schools property — valued at $5.7 billion. If state and university property is excluded, the city exempts nearly $1.5 billion in nonprofit property, which would produce about $15 million in revenue for the city if fully taxed.

Currently, 17 tax-exempt entities have negotiated arrangements with the city — usually after a change to the property — to make payments in lieu of taxes that will total $877,000 for 2012.

No one envisions the city will seek to get the full tax payment from all nonprofits.

In Boston, under its new program, nonprofits that own property valued at more than $15 million are asked to increase payments over five years until they reach 25 percent of what they'd pay if they didn't have nonprofit tax status, the city's website says. The system also gives nonprofits credits for providing benefits to the community.

Can someone explain to me why they pay voluntarily? It's not truly voluntary, is it? There's some lurking coercion, some extortion, isn't there?

IN THE COMMENTS: Irene said:

"Mandatory volunteerism" is the progressive's way of treating everyone like children. It's one of my favorite oxymorons.

Schools first introduce this approach by requiring children to participate in mandatory duties shaded vaguely as "voluntary" activities that benefit the community. Example: "Earth Day cleanup" for the grade schoolers or "orientations" for first-year law students that require arboretum clean-up or Habitat-for Humanity work.

If tax payment is shrouded in "voluntary" language, it makes the maliable feel like they are participating in the general good. Part of the progressive community. Part of the group think.

Madison's Mayor Soglin: "That is the most reactionary, right-wing, tea party argument I have heard.”

Said to a defender of the Occupy Madison encampment, which has occupied a city-owned parking lot since last fall.

Allen [from Occupy] “tea party argument?”

Mayor, says “yes”, that is the most selfish, right-wing, tea party argument I heard, I listened to it on Tuesday night, and to me that was the most offensive thing I heard all evening. That the site didn’t cost anything, that there was no public expense.

Allen asks what was the public expense that would not be spent three or four times as much if these people were out in the community?

Mayor says the city has a public health department. Who pays for it?

Allen says “How many people out there were served by the Public Health Department?”

The mayor says you are missing the point.

Allen says I guess I am.

And last night, after a long meeting, the City Council voted against extending the permit to use the parking lot.

But you should have heard the crying and pleading from dedicated Madison folk about how important it was to keep open this wholly unregulated, health-code flouting shanty town, which, it was argued, was housing the homeless.

ADDED: I was rushing to an early morning appointment as I put this post up, so let me elaborate a little.

First, my "you should have heard" is based on personal knowledge. Meade and I watched the meeting on television, and there were many extremely earnest witnesses talking about how the Occupy camp was ministering to the poor and outcast.

Second, my first link goes to a blog post by Brenda Konkel about a meeting various Occupy people had with the mayor last Friday. Konkel says she's transcribing an audiotape of that meeting. Mayor Soglin takes the position that the city has organized, well-funded services for the homeless and rejects the idea of the Occupy camp as an alternative approach to dealing with the homeless. The Occupy people are critical of the "conditions" and requirements at the city's institutions.

Steve [from Occupy says] It started as a political protest, people had good intentions, for a lot of reasons it changed into something different. And in some ways, what came out of it is better than just people protesting against the 1%. And other cities do make this work, other cities do see some potential in that. What I’m saying is Terry has, I’m in this because of Terry, I see he has some amazing skills in terms of conflict resolution, in terms of people seeing some value in their lives, that they are not getting from the existing system and I just think the city has to have some imagination about how to make use of his skills instead of telling him get lost, we have no place for you.

When the mayor accuses the Occupy folk of making a right-wing argument, he explains (as paraphrased/transcribed by Konkel):

[T]he point is we have in place a health department, we have in place a fire department, we have in place a city treasurer, we have in place all these functions that are available if needed which cost money every single day. This is not Horatio Alger, this is not a world where everyone is in there on their own. And there may have been days when the fire department wasn’t called in, but it had to be paid for every single day because we wanted to know it was available....

AND: Here's the video of the entire city council meeting. Go to 2:58:22 and hear Alderman Mark Clear say "Capitalism pays for socialism." Context:

I've been all over the map emotionally myself on this issue.... I really appreciate and value what Occupy Madison has done for this city... I'm proud that we as a community unlike many other communities in this country have been able to sustain it.... I was ready to say, early tonight, you know, April 30th/June 30th, it's not that big a deal, so let's buy us some time.... After hearing the kind of legal and logistical issues that we're faced with... I've come to the conclusion that that's not a viable option....

The way to deal with poverty in the city, he says, is through development. We need to build our tax base:

Capitalism pays for socialism. That's absolutely true. The way we will be able to help the people we want to help in our community is by having the resources to be able to do it. And the only way we can do that... is by growing our real estate base.

Yesterday, we drove past the new "Occupy Madison" encampment...

... which you can see in the first 10 seconds of this 14-minute video...



... and you can hang out with Meade and me for the rest of the drive if you want. You'll see some more of Madison and the University of Wisconsin and eavesdrop on us. It's not all politics, I assure you, at 2 p.m. on a beautiful Saturday.

ADDED: A couple extra videos for reference. Here's the awesome song "United We Stand" by Brotherhood of Man:



And here's one of the wonderful "I'm a Pepper" commercials from the 1970s:



Of course, you must know the Herman Cain "smoking man" commercial, and here's the take-off by the Huntsman daughters.

AND: 2 more references. Donald Rumsfeld:



And Little Edie:

Sidewalk benches removed, then reinstalled, in Madison's neverending struggle to balance good and evil.

So it seemed like a good idea to remove those benches in front of Jimmy John's and Taco Bell because supposedly that's where drug dealers were sitting. But then various nice people emailed the mayor, Paul Soglin, to complain that now there were fewer places for regular people to sit, plus it seemed like an attack on the homeless. So Soglin had the benches reinstalled.

My first thought, as a taxpayer, is: You people wasted our money. My second thought is: If you know where the drug dealers habitually sit, arrest them.

This is why it was the right decision to vote for Paul Soglin for mayor.

He's actually using his brain to make real decisions. Not bullshit gestures to pander to Madisonians... like Mayor Dave.

"Soglin, mayor from 1973 to 1979 and again from 1989 to 1997, narrowly lost to Cieslewicz in 2003 — and it still bothers him."

From the Wisconsin State Journal's profile of Soglin (who is running against Madison's "Mayor Dave" in the April 5th elections):

Asked why he lost, Soglin said, "the enormous impact of (Dane County Executive) Kathleen Falk's endorsement and my opposition to IZ."

Inclusionary zoning, which made developers put lower cost housing in projects, had great appeal to the political left and was a central issue in 2003. Soglin, sensitive to concerns voiced by developers and landlords, predicted — in hindsight, correctly — it wouldn't work. He backed a voluntary program.

"Dave exploited it for all it was worth," Soglin said.

Paul Soglin over Mayor Dave Cieslewicz in the Madison mayoral primary.

It's a big deal around here:

In a remarkable comeback, former Mayor Paul Soglin won the Madison mayoral primary by a narrow margin over two-term incumbent Mayor Dave Cieslewicz, assuring a general election for the record books on April 5....

Cieslewicz is seeking a third four-year term. Soglin, who to the mayor's surprise entered the race late on Dec. 22, held the office longer than anyone in two stints in the 1970s, '80s and '90s.

Back to the 70s!

The mayor ran on his record — a top bond rating, more cops and fire stations, rebuilding the Central Library, automated trash collection, his vision for a new economy and challenges presented by Gov. Scott Walker and the GOP-controlled state Legislature.

Of Soglin, [UW polisci prof Charles] Franklin, said, "He's maintained a political base in the city that's truly remarkable when you consider how long his career has spanned. And of Cieslewicz, Franklin said, "with two terms in office has failed to make the office securely his own."

I happened to get a picture of Soglin the other day when I went down to the demonstration:



Somehow this song plays in my head....

A little bit of courage is all we lack
So catch me if you can, I'm goin' back