Almost 30 years ago, my then-boss at the then-Monona Community Herald wrote a story about a group of old baseball players, beginning with a line from Bruce Springsteen’s “Glory Days”:
Well, time slips away and leaves you with nothing mister …
“Glory Days” is deceptively up-tempo for the subject matter — a former high school baseball hero, a woman who split with her husband, the narrator’s unemployed father and the narrator “sitting back trying to recapture a little of the glory of …”
This comes up for two reasons. The annual University of Wisconsin Varsity Band Concert is tonight and Saturday night at the Kohl Center in Madison. Which requires this commercial interruption from Facebook and UW Band director Mike Leckrone:
We have tickets to Saturday night.
My weight loss over the past few years means that, remarkably, I can wear my UW Band jacket and the band sweater I wore my last four years in the band (the design changed after my freshman year) since I weigh a few pounds more than I did when I graduated from UW in 1988. (We won’t discuss the state of the body parts required for marching, because of The March Of Time!) And as you know, I have a retired UW Band trumpet, from my father for a Father’s Day, the gift of which I have repaid by not playing it in my parents’ presence, but playing at two Episcopal churches, neither of which threw me out after playing, for some odd reason. (Forgiveness, I guess.)
To demonstrate how ingrained the band became in my brain: On Tuesday night, I had yet another Band Dream. I discovered that I was playing in the Varsity Band Concert that night. I had a trumpet, and apparently whatever I was wearing was sufficient for the concert, though I lacked one important additional item — music.
Well, there was one more thing I lacked — the schedule. I got up to visit the bathroom (something I do before broadcasts, to avoid having to arrive at intermission before intermission is supposed to arrive), and while I was there I heard the band play the first notes of the opening of “On Wisconsin.” (Which changes every year, by the way. This year is fanfare number 46.) I was trying to figure out how to sneak onto the stage where I was supposed to sit and play when I woke up.
I have had that dream, or the marching band variation of that dream, far more often than any other college-related dream, most recently two months ago. (Even stranger: While I was in college I had a dream that the band was going to get its own dorm. Ponder that one, readers from the ’80s.)
Long-time readers have read more than they probably wanted to about how central the band was in my life. Before the first game I marched, another band member and I went to the McDonald’s closest to Camp Randall Stadium, in uniform, for lunch. I felt like a rock star given the reaction of people in the restaurant.
It’s interesting to me (and probably no one else, but you’re reading this, so …) that as someone who has felt compelled most of my life to be an independent thinker, to be an individual and to not just blend in, that I was happy to blend in to the band. My first ambition was to just get in, since there were more people trying out for the band than there would be members of the 1983 Marching Band. Once I found out that not everyone in the band marches every pregame and every halftime, my lone ambition was to march every pregame and every halftime. And I did — 39 pregames and 39 halftimes in five years.
I didn’t ever solo, because I wasn’t that good a trumpet player. (Or perhaps just “good,” though I could and did play loudly and with sufficient spacing and what Leckrone called “INERGY!”) I have a hard time believing I was much of a marcher either because of my appalling lack of athletic ability. (And yet I dropped my music once and never dropped my trumpet in five years in Camp Randall and other football stadiums, even with national TV cameras in my face.) I had a job, and I did my job.
My guess is that there will be more than one reference to the Final Four …
… where by NCAA rules only 30 members could play. (Ten times that number will play at the Kohl Center.)
This exercise in nostalgia is prompted by something else too, which is not happy.
In the foreground of this photo are three members of Rank 1 in the 1980s — (from left) Tom Baitinger, Pat Bork and Steve Semmann. Steve died of brain cancer in 2009. Tom was a St. Petersburg, Fla., police sergeant who died while serving a warrant in 2011. And earlier this week came the news that Pat died of a stroke.
I wouldn’t say we were friends, but we shared the same experiences of the band in the ’80s — a football team that went to three bowl games in four years, and then none for nine years; a basketball team that never went anywhere; a hockey team that was good, but (at least while I was there) wasn’t good enough to get to the Frozen Four; and balancing band with all of our other college responsibilities. And yet the UW was more fun than real life, as 100 percent of UW students have discovered.
I’m aware of three other members of the band in my day who died a few years after my graduation. A field assistant, Bill Garvey, the long-time director of the McFarland High School band, died of cancer in 2012, after he got to march with his daughter in the 2012 Rose Bowl parade. The long-time band announcer (and, for lack of a better term, executive assistant), Jack Rane, died after the 1994 Rose Bowl. Just a year ago, Gail Johnson, the long time band secretary, died.
Bill’s wife, Michelle, wrote on Facebook, “Please remember that life is a gift. RIP Pat and know that Bill will be waiting for you with his great smile and a big huge hug!”
And that’s a good place to end this. On Wisconsin.
In Britain, being intelligent is called being “clever.” Keep that in mind (and forgive the British English misspellings) when you read David Robson:
If ignorance is bliss, does a high IQ equal misery? Popular opinion would have it so. We tend to think of geniuses as being plagued by existential angst, frustration, and loneliness. Think of Virginia Woolf, Alan Turing, or Lisa Simpson – lone stars, isolated even as they burn their brightest. As Ernest Hemingway wrote: “Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.”
The question may seem like a trivial matter concerning a select few – but the insights it offers could have ramifications for many. Much of our education system is aimed at improving academic intelligence; although its limits are well known, IQ is still the primary way of measuring cognitive abilities, and we spend millions on brain training and cognitive enhancers that try to improve those scores. But what if the quest for genius is itself a fool’s errand?
The first steps to answering these questionswere taken almost a century ago, at the height of the American Jazz Age. At the time, the new-fangled IQ test was gaining traction, after proving itself in World War One recruitment centres, and in 1926, psychologist LewisTerman decided to use it to identify and study a group of gifted children. Combing California’s schools for the creme de la creme, he selected 1,500 pupils with an IQ of 140 or more – 80 of whom hadIQs above 170. Together, they became known as the “Termites”, and the highs and lows of their lives are still being studied to this day.As you might expect, many of the Termites did achieve wealth and fame – most notably Jess Oppenheimer, the writer of the classic 1950s sitcom I Love Lucy. Indeed, by the time his series aired on CBS, the Termites’ average salary was twice that of the average white-collar job. But not all the group met Terman’s expectations – there were many who pursued more “humble” professions such as police officers, seafarers, and typists. For this reason, Terman concluded that “intellect and achievement are far from perfectly correlated”. Nor did their smarts endow personal happiness. Over the course of their lives, levels of divorce, alcoholism and suicide were about the same as the national average.
As the Termites enter their dotage, the moral of their story – that intelligence does not equate to a better life – has been told again and again. At best, a great intellect makes no differences to your life satisfaction; at worst, it can actually mean you are less fulfilled.
That’s not to say that everyone with a high IQ is a tortured genius, as popular culture might suggest – but it is nevertheless puzzling. Why don’t the benefits of sharper intelligence pay off in the long term.
One possibility is that knowledge of your talents becomes something of a ball and chain. Indeed, during the 1990s, the surviving Termites were asked to look back at the events in their 80-year lifespan. Rather than basking in their successes, many reported that they had been plagued by the sense that they had somehow failed to live up to their youthful expectations.
That sense of burden – particularly when combined with others’ expectations – is a recurring motif for many other gifted children. …
Another common complaint, often heard in student bars and internet forums, is that smarter people somehow have a clearer vision of the world’s failings. Whereas the rest of us are blinkered from existential angst, smarter people lay awake agonising over the human condition or other people’s folly.
Constant worrying may, in fact, be a sign of intelligence – but not in the way these armchair philosophers had imagined. Interviewing students on campus about various topics of discussion, Alexander Penney at MacEwan University in Canada found that those with the higher IQ did indeed feel more anxiety throughout the day. Interestingly, most worries were mundane, day-to-day concerns, though; the high-IQ students were far more likely to be replaying an awkward conversation, than asking the “big questions”. “It’s not that their worries were more profound, but they are just worrying more often about more things,” says Penney. “If something negative happened, they thought about it more.”
Probing more deeply, Penney found that this seemed to correlate with verbal intelligence – the kind tested by word games in IQ tests, compared to prowess at spatial puzzles (which, in fact, seemed to reduce the risk of anxiety). He speculates that greater eloquence might also make you more likely toverbalise anxieties and ruminate over them. It’s not necessarily a disadvantage, though. “Maybe they were problem-solving a bit more than most people,” he says – which might help them to learn from their mistakes.The harsh truth, however, is that greater intelligence does not equate to wiser decisions; in fact, in some cases it might make your choices a little more foolish. Keith Stanovich at the University of Toronto has spent the last decade building tests for rationality, and he has found that fair, unbiased decision-making is largely independent of IQ. Consider the “my-side bias” – our tendency to be highly selective in the information we collect so that it reinforces our previous attitudes. The more enlightened approach would be to leave your assumptions at the door as you build your argument – but Stanovich found that smarter people are almost no more likely to do so than people with distinctly average IQs.
That’s not all. People who ace standard cognitive tests are in fact slightly more likely to have a “bias blind spot”. That is, they are less able to see their own flaws, even when though they are quite capable of criticising the foibles of others. And they have a greater tendency to fall for the “gambler’s fallacy” – the idea that if a tossed coin turns heads 10 times, it will be more likely to fall tails on the 11th. The fallacy has been the ruination of roulette players planning for a red after a string of blacks, and it can also lead stock investors to sell their shares before they reach peak value – in the belief that their luck has to run out sooner or later.
A tendency to rely on gut instincts rather than rational thought might also explain why a surprisingly high number of Mensa members believe in the paranormal; or why someone with an IQ of 140 is about twice as likely to max out their credit card.
Indeed, Stanovich sees these biases in every strata of society. “There is plenty of dysrationalia – people doing irrational things despite more than adequate intelligence – in our world today,” he says. “The people pushing the anti-vaccination meme on parents and spreading misinformation on websites are generally of more than average intelligence and education.” Clearly, clever people can be dangerously, and foolishly, misguided.
So if intelligence doesn’t lead to rational decisions and a better life, what does? Igor Grossmann, at the University of Waterloo in Canada, thinks we need to turn our minds to an age-old concept: “wisdom”. His approach is more scientific that it might at first sound. “The concept of wisdom has an ethereal quality to it,” he admits. “But if you look at the lay definition of wisdom, many people would agree it’s the idea of someone who can make good unbiased judgement.”
In one experiment, Grossmann presented his volunteers with different social dilemmas – ranging from what to do about the war in Crimea to heartfelt crises disclosed to Dear Abby, the Washington Post’s agony aunt. As the volunteers talked, a panel of psychologists judged their reasoning and weakness to bias: whether it was a rounded argument, whether the candidates were ready to admit the limits of their knowledge – their “intellectual humility” – and whether they were ignoring important details that didn’t fit their theory.
High scores turned out to predict greater life satisfaction, relationship quality, and, crucially, reduced anxiety and rumination – all the qualities that seem to be absent in classically smart people. Wiser reasoning even seemed to ensure a longer life – those with the higher scores were less likely to die over intervening years. Crucially, Grossmann found that IQ was not related to any of these measures, and certainly didn’t predict greater wisdom. “People who are very sharp may generate, very quickly, arguments [for] why their claims are the correct ones – but may do it in a very biased fashion.”
Fortunately, wisdom is probably not set in stone – whatever your IQ score. “I’m a strong believer that wisdom can be trained,” says Grossmann. He points out that we often find it easier to leave our biases behind when we consider other people, rather than ourselves. Along these lines, he has found that simply talking through your problems in the third person (“he” or “she”, rather than “I”) helps create the necessary emotional distance, reducing your prejudices and leading to wiser arguments. Hopefully, more research will suggest many similar tricks.
The challenge will be getting people to admit their own foibles. If you’ve been able to rest on the laurels of your intelligence all your life, it could be very hard to accept that it has been blinding your judgement.
In his 1992 Republican National Convention speech, President George H. W. Bush proposed letting taxpayers commit up to 10 percent of their payment to reducing the national debt. The proposal never went anywhere, but it points to a good idea: Taxpayers should be able to designate how their tax dollars are spent. Already, we allow for this in very limited ways. A check-off at the top of the 1040 form invites every taxpayer to direct $3 of their federal tax to the Presidential Election Campaign Fund (only 6 percent of taxpayers do). In Virginia, my VAC invites me to contribute additional funds to more than 100 organizations ranging from the Democratic and Republican parties to the U.S. Olympic Committee, the Virginia Arts Foundation, and many local school and library funds.
Why not take this one step further? Why shouldn’t taxpayers make direct decisions about how much money they want to spend on other government programs, like paying off the national debt, the war in Iraq or the National Endowment for the Arts? This would force the federal government to focus time and resources on projects citizens actually want, not just efforts that appeal to special interests.
To do this, we’d have to expand the concept of the campaign financing checkoff to all government programs. With this reform, the real expression of popular democracy would take place not every four years but every April 15. A new final page of the 1040 form would be created, called 1040-D (for democracy). At the top, the taxpayer would write in his total tax as determined by the 1040 form. Following would be a list of government programs, along with the percentage of the federal budget devoted to each (as proposed by Congress and the president). The taxpayer would then multiply that percentage by his total tax to determine the “amount requested” in order to meet the government’s total spending request. (Computerization of tax returns has made this step simple.) The taxpayer would then consider that request and enter the amount he was willing to pay for that program in the final column–the amount requested by the government, or more, or less, down to zero.
A taxpayer who thinks that $600 billion is too much to spend on military in the post-Cold War era could choose to allocate less to that function than the government requested. A taxpayer who thinks that Congress has been underfunding Head Start and the arts could allocate double the requested amount for those programs.
There would be quite a bit of debate, of course, over how to list programs in the 1040-D program. Spending interests would want to use broad categories–national defense, health, education, job training. Opponents of spending would prefer to narrow the categories so taxpayers can see what they’re really buying– defense of Japan and Korea, war in Iraq, farm subsidies, mass-transit “demonstration” projects in West Virginia, and so on. Libertarians and the arts establishment might agree on listing just “arts,” while the religious right might lobby to have the category broken into “fine arts,” “pork-barrel arts,” and “obscene art.” Language would be an issue – “corporate welfare” or “loans for small businesses”?
Real budget democracy, of course, means not just that the taxpayers can decide where their money will go but also that they can decide how much of their money the government is entitled to. Thus the last line on the 1040-D form must be “Tax refund.” The form would indicate that none of the taxpayer’s duly calculated tax should be refunded to him; but under budget democracy the taxpayer would have the right to allocate less than the amount requested for some or all programs in order to claim a refund (beyond whatever excess withholding is already due him).
Entitlements would be the biggest problem. About 60 percent of the federal budget now goes to entitlement programs. Medicare and Medicaid make up more than 20 percent of spending, and most of that comes from general revenues. Should taxpayers be able to withhold their hard-earned dollars from such programs? In a free society, they should. So how do we handle a shortage of funding? Congress could change the spending parameters to fit what the taxpayers are willing to supply. The budget democracy process could also include a provision allowing Congress by a two-thirds vote to override the taxpayers and insist on larger payments to pay for entitlements or other services deemed essential.
Then, instead of trying to decide which candidate might be telling the truth about his commitment to fiscal responsibility, the taxpayers could take matters into their own hands, finally being able to say effectively, “You’re spending too much. We’re cutting your budget.”
The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto dares to criticize Hillary Clinton:
“I think it’s fair to say that . . . the deck is still stacked in favor of those already at the top,” declared Hillary Clinton in Monticello, Iowa, yesterday. She might have added: And that’s why it is clear even now that I am going to be the Democratic nominee for president of the United States.
National Journal reports that Mrs. Clinton was “speaking to just 22 people.” That’s true if your definition of “person” excludes corporations—specifically media corporations—and their employees, for “those [22] Iowans were far outnumbered by the dozens of reporters who were bunched together behind a thin yellow rope at the back of the room”:
Bigger yet was the press crowd outside, where reporters who weren’t admitted to the event chased Clinton’s van when it first pulled up here, contributing to the feeling of a media circus surrounding the former secretary of State’s Iowa launch.
And quite a scene that was. “MSNBC’s Clinton beat reporter Alex Seitz-Wald heroically remained in place and on camera Tuesday afternoon as the rest of the political press corps chased Hillary Clinton’s so-called Scooby Van upon its arrival at a roundtable meet and greet in Iowa,” Mediaite reports.
The video, which appears at the bottom of the Mediaite report, is funny. Funnier still is the Washington Free Beacon’s speeded-up Vine loop of the scene. Funniest of all would be the WFB loop set to the theme music from “The Benny Hill Show.” HotAir.com headlines a post on the scene “What the First Amendment Was Made For.”
Mediaite also notes that Bloomberg Politics editor Mark Halperin—last seen scoffing at the wild notion that Mrs. Clinton “is enjoying a honeymoon w/ the media,” showed up yesterday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” where he exulted over Mrs. Clinton’s visit to an Ohio Chipotle:
“Her problem is not to prove to people that she’s ready for president,” . . . Halperin said. “The two words she needs are fun and new. And part of why [Monday] was so successful is, she looks like she’s having fun and she’s doing, for her, new stuff. We’ve never seen her get a burrito before.”
Maybe not, but as the Weekly Standard’s Daniel Halper reports, she is not a stranger to the Chipotle brand. Last year, the Mexican fast-food chain’s co-CEO Monty Moran spoke at the Clinton Global Initiative, part of the Clinton family’s gigabuck nonprofit empire: “The title of Moran’s panel discussion was, ‘The Case for Economic Justice.’ It was moderated by then Meet the Press host David Gregory.” (Come to think of it, maybe Halperin’s point was that “honeymoon” is an inapt metaphor given the duration of the Clinton-media relationship.)
Elaborating on the stacked-deck theme, Mrs. Clinton complained: “There’s something wrong when CEOs make 300 times more than the typical worker.” According to Salary.com, Moran’s compensation in 2014 was $28,153,202, mostly in stock-option grants. If the Chipotle workers who prepared and served Mrs. Clinton’s burrito are typical, then, each makes a little under $94,000 a year—nice work if you can get it.
As if that isn’t unfair enough, HotAir’s Ed Morrissey notes that in 2013 Mrs. Clinton received a mere $14 million advance for her memoir “Hard Choices.” That’s less than half of Moran’s annual earnings! No wonder Mrs. Clinton was reduced to scraping up $300,000 speaking honorariums just to make ends meet.
Mrs. Clinton gave the Washington Post “a brief interview” yesterday, during which she “said she had developed a plan to overhaul the way money is spent in political campaigns”:
Earlier in the day she said she wanted to fix the country’s “dysfunctional” campaign finance system, even backing a constitutional amendment if necessary.
Asked about her campaign finance agenda, Clinton said, “We do have a plan. We have a plan for my plan.”
It’s reminiscent of what they said about Teddy Roosevelt’s campaign-finance ideas: A man, a plan, a plan for a plan, a plan for a plan for a canal, a plan for . . .
One thing Mrs. Clinton isn’t planning is a shoestring operation. The New York Times reported Saturday that her campaign combined with “the outside groups supporting her candidacy” is “expected to be a $2.5 billion effort, dwarfing the vast majority of her would-be rivals in both parties.” In 2012 Politico put the equivalent figures for Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, respectively, at $1.123 billion and $1.019 billion—less combined than the expected Clinton total.
“When The Post asked about the role of Priorities USA Action, a pro-Clinton super PAC currently trying to raise hundreds of millions of dollars to help her campaign, [Mrs.] Clinton shrugged her shoulders and said, ‘I don’t know.’ ” (At least she didn’t say, “What difference does it make?”) That’s enough to satisfy Slate’s Beth Ethier:
While Clinton’s detractors will almost certainly accuse her of hypocrisy for denouncing the loosened restrictions on fundraising that have allowed her shadow campaign to amass a huge war chest, the Citizens United ruling offers an airtight defense: Since she is not allowed to “coordinate” with her unofficial army, she couldn’t make them stop spending money on her, even if she wanted to.
That would be a non sequitur if it weren’t two non sequiturs. First, the source of the “coordination” ban is not Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010) but Congress, which in the 1970s enacted legislation that treats “expenditures controlled by or coordinated with the candidate” as campaign contributions. It was in Buckley v. Valeo (1976) that the Supreme Court held that limits on independent expenditures—in which such control or coordination was absent—were unconstitutional violations of free speech, “with only one Justice dissenting,” as Justice Anthony Kennedy noted in Citizens United.
Second, while it’s technically true that Mrs. Clinton “couldn’t make them stop spending money,” it’s far-fetched to suggest that a public renunciation of Priorities USA Action’s support would count as illegal coordination unless it was backed up (or undermined) by some behind-the-scenes maneuvering.
The expected wealth of Mrs. Clinton’s and her supporters’ campaigns exemplifies how campaign-finance restrictions stack the deck “in favor of those already at the top,” namely incumbents. Obama and Romney might have been close to parity in the campaign-money department, but the president had no primary challenge, which meant he could spend his primary war chest to get a jump on the general election. Mrs. Clinton is not an incumbent, but unless a serious challenge emerges for the Democratic nomination, she will be situated as if she were one.
Mrs. Clinton’s most outrageous hypocrisy, however, rests in her call to amend the Constitution to curtail free speech. This has been a popular position on the left since Citizens United. As we noted in September, by that time all but a handful of Senate Democrats had signed on as co-sponsors of a resolution to propose an amendment for near-total repeal of the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of speech. In this regard, as in much else, Mrs. Clinton is a follower, not a leader.
But she is a follower in a particularly awkward way, for Citizens United was not just about freedom of speech. It was also about Hillary Clinton. Here is Justice Kennedy’s outline of the facts of the case (citations omitted):
In January 2008, Citizens United released a film entitled Hillary: The Movie. . . . It is a 90-minute documentary about then-Senator Hillary Clinton, who was a candidate in the Democratic Party’s 2008 Presidential primary elections. Hillary mentions Senator Clinton by name and depicts interviews with political commentators and other persons, most of them quite critical of Senator Clinton. Hillary was released in theaters and on DVD, but Citizens United wanted to increase distribution by making it available through video-on-demand. . . .
In December 2007, a cable company offered, for a payment of $1.2 million, to make Hillary available on a video-on-demand channel called “Elections ’08.” Some video-on-demand services require viewers to pay a small fee to view a selected program, but here the proposal was to make Hillary available to viewers free of charge.
To implement the proposal, Citizens United was prepared to pay for the video-on-demand; and to promote the film, it produced two 10-second ads and one 30-second ad for Hillary. Each ad includes a short (and, in our view, pejorative) statement about Senator Clinton, followed by the name of the movie and the movie’s Website address. Citizens United desired to promote the video-on-demand offering by running advertisements on broadcast and cable television.
The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia held that the FEC had the legal authority to suppress the movie “because it was ‘susceptible of no other interpretation than to inform the electorate that Senator Clinton is unfit for office, that the United States would be a dangerous place in a President Hillary Clinton world, and that viewers should vote against her.’ ”
Now, in a bitter foretaste of life in “a President Hillary Clinton world,” Mrs. Clinton is urging an amendment to the Constitution to do away with the right to criticize her.
Do you work in the media and have the gall to think that the entire Webster’s dictionary is at your disposal? Think again, you sexist.
When it comes to reporting on Hillary Clinton, George Carlin’s “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television” have turned into “Twelve Words You Can Never Say About a Powerful Politician.”
“We will be watching, reading, listening and protesting coded sexism,” the pro-Hillary group HRC Super Volunteers warned The New York Times’ Amy Chozick …
What are those words?
Polarizing.
Calculating.
Disingenuous.
Insincere.
Ambitious.
Inevitable.
Entitled.
Overconfident.
Secretive.
“Will do anything to win.”
“Represents the past.”
“Out of touch.”
There are two words that are pretty meaningless — “polarizing” (so what?) and “ambitious.” Every other word or phrase clearly does apply to Hillary Clinton.
And if Hillary supporters don’t like using any of those verboten words, they really won’t like what D.C. Clothesline did to Hillary’s campaign logo:
Today in 1969, MC5 demonstrated how not to protest a department store’s failure to sell your albums: Take out a Detroit newspaper ad that says “Fuck Hudsons.”
Not only did Hudsons not change its mind, Elektra Records dropped MC5.
Detective Kenneth Hutchinson of a California police department had the number one single today in 1977:
It was an odd briefing on a tragic double murder after a deadly van crash. Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett greeted reporters looking for an update on the ongoing investigation, not Police Chief Ed Flynn.
“Mayor, I saw the Chief as I was walking in. He was leaving,” said Channel 12’s Colleen Henry as soon as Barrett asked for questions. “I’m wondering if there’s a reason he’s not here talking to us about this violence.”
“Because I wanted to talk about it myself,” Barrett answered.
The way he did was jarring, condemning the murders, but immediately shifting the blame for them from the murderers themselves or city and county criminal justice policies to state and federal law and even the NRA.
“In the span of three or four hours on a beautiful Sunday evening, we had four people who died,” Barrett said. This is news, but is it enough news to make…our state lawmakers, our federal lawmakers, [or] candidates for President to pause and say ‘What’s going on here?’”
In fact, a state lawmaker and candidate for President, Governor Scott Walker, has been talking about violence in Milwaukee, most recently after a one year-old boy was shot and killed just after Christmas, in this exchange with FOX 6 reporter Mike Lowe:
Lowe: “But Chief Flynn and Mayor Barrett have asked you for something very specific, and that is legislation that would say, if you’ve been convicted of a misdemeanor three times in the last five years, you can’t own a gun. Right now you’re allowed to do that. And what they’re saying is these are people committing felonies and plea bargaining them down to misdemeanors, so you’ve got felons running around with guns. Is that something you’d be willing to consider?”
Walker: “Sure. The more things we can do to get illegal guns out of the hands of criminals , the better. Part of it, too, goes back to the district attorney’s office, where right now, without a law change, they have the ability — if they view gun violence to be a problem — to charge, as other counties do across the state of Wisconsin. In many counties people will go in for an extended amount of time to the prison system. For whatever variety of reasons that has not happened in Milwaukee County.”
That is what’s known as prosecutorial discretion, and it has nothing to do with state politics.
Instead, it reflects a willingness of the Milwaukee County District Attorney’s Office to accept plea deals that allow violent individuals to avoid significant prison time and, as a result, return more quickly to the City’s streets.
Take, for example, Sylvester Lewis, who had a criminal record that began at age 12, included at least 15 arrests, and culminated with a felony criminal conviction for burglary at age 18.
Yet for some reason he was not in prison, but instead on the streets on May 21st, 2014, when he opened fire on another man but instead shot and killed 10 year-old Sierra Guyton as she played on the Clarke Street School playground.
What state law could have prevented that shooting? Lewis was a felon in possession of a firearm and therefore in violation of Wisconsin Statute 941.29. On May 21st, 2014, that was irrelevant. He was still able to kill little Sierra.
What led more directly to Lewis being able to kill Sierra Guyton, a gun law that he willfully violated or a sweetheart plea deal that kept him out of prison even after a felony conviction and a lengthy juvenile record?
“We know several things are happening. We know that there are more guns that are flooding the streets of our city,” Barrett continued on Monday.
But do we know how many of them were legally purchased and legally carried? The Wisconsin Department of Justice is not permitted to keep statistics on where concealed carry permit permits are granted, so it is impossible to know whether there are more of them in Milwaukee, which has by far the highest rate of gun violence in the state.
However, a search of records seems to indicate that only one concealed carry permit holder out of the more than 200,000 in Wisconsin has ever been convicted of a homicide. Phillip K. Green was convicted last January of shooting an acquaintance to death during a fight at a house party in May of 2013.
Another man, Todd Hadley, was acquitted in November of 2013of shooting a man to death and injuring another.
He and Green appear to be the only two concealed carry permit holders ever charged with fatal shootings since Wisconsin became the 49th state to allow residents to carry concealed firearms in 2011.
By way of comparison, Barrett said that the City of Milwaukee’s “homicides year-to-date are up 160%, from 14 to 39.”
Never mind that that is actually an increase of 178.5%. The Mayor’s math mistake can be excused, but what can’t be ignored is that 19.5 times more people have been killed by non-concealed carry permit holders in just four months than have been killed by concealed carry permit holders.
Barrett continued by refuting claims that an increased police presence could have possibly stopped Sunday’s violence.
“No increase in police staffing levels would have prevented the horrific tragedy on 48th Street yesterday,” he said.
But somehow a state law could have? There is obviously a law in Wisconsin forbidding murder, and it is punishable by the harshest sentence allowable under state law—life in prison without the possibility of extended supervision.
On 48th Street in Milwaukee on Sunday, that law was wholly ignored by a suspect who either didn’t think about the legal consequences of double murder or didn’t care.
If someone would willfully violate the most serious state law on the books, what makes Mayor Barrett so confident that that same suspect would respect a law prohibiting him from owning or purchasing a firearm?
Barrett’s rant then meandered into presidential politics.
“We know we had seven, eight candidates rushing to the altar of the NRA to say how they’re protecting freedoms. No freedoms were protected in Milwaukee where those four people died, three of them because of gunshots.”
It perhaps should go without saying that there does not appear to be any record of an NRA member being convicted of murder in Milwaukee in recent history, but Barrett’s statement appears to be impugning the organization for its lobbying on behalf of the Second Amendment right for law-abiding citizens to keep and bear arms.
In fact, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed in District of Columbia v. Heller that the Amendment does in fact confer “the individual right to possess and carry weapons in case of confrontation.”
Moreover, federal law already requires gun purchasers to pass a National Instant Criminal Background Check System screening, and every state makes it illegal for a felon to own any sort of firearm.
Again, felons generally ignore laws because, well, they are felons and either don’t consider the consequences of their actions or don’t care about them. As such, they tend to obtain the guns that they use in crimes through theft, illegal purchase on the “black market” or a “straw purchase.” All of these, it should be noted, violate the law.
So where is Barrett’s evidence that someone who is willing to shoot two people to death in broad daylight would obey a new state law?
“This community has to face the reality that the gun laws that this state has put forward over the last few years, as proud as it makes the Governor and the Legislature feel, has resulted in more guns on the City of Milwaukee,” Barrett asserted.
If the Mayor is going by the number of guns seized, which he seemed to be when he highlighted the fact that “the police have taken 628 guns off our streets so far this year,” that is simply not true.
In 2006, Milwaukee Police seized 2,490 guns and another 2,733 in 2007, long before the Republican State Legislature passed its Concealed Carry Law and other new gun regulations in 2011.
Of course, the Mayor didn’t mention that when concluding his remarks by chiding the state government for supposedly not funding law enforcement in Milwaukee.
“We need to have a state government that’s going to devote resources to this issue. I need the Attorney General to have his office engaged with our police department directly,” Barrett said. “I need him to help us in the Legislature and the Governor to get more resources to our District Attorney’s Office so we can have more prosecutions of gun crimes.”
As opposed to, say, a politically motivated John Doe prosecution of constitutionally protected political speech that numerous judges have shut down?
Because that prosecution has easily cost more than $1 million in legal fees alone—money that could have been spent on the gun prosecutions that Barrett so desperately wants. In fact, the cost of the unconstitutional John Doe is likely much higher, but the District Attorney’s Office has refused to disclose how much it spent on what amounted to a partisan witch hunt.
No, the real reason that we don’t have, in the Mayor’s words, “prosecutions of gun crimes” is because there is prevailing belief in both City and County government that “minor offenses” shouldn’t be punished.
The Mayor said as much on Monday, pledging that he doesn’t “want to lock up a lot of people who are carrying a nickel bag of marijuana, but I do want to lock up more people who get involved in gun fights.”
That, it seems, is the fundamental problem right there: a lax attitude toward criminality that has emboldened a criminal element in Milwaukee to no longer fear the consequences of illegal activity.
And when that criminal element isn’t locked up, but rather routinely plea bargains down serious crimes to get back on the streets more quickly, it’s a recipe for disaster for Milwaukee or for any city whose leaders seem more interested in shifting blame than getting tough on crime.
By the way: Between Sunday and this morning, Milwaukee had seven homicides. Since Jan. 1, Milwaukee has had 43 homicides. Great quality of life you got there, Mayor Barrett.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 