THE VINDICATION OF LOUIS BUTLER -- and How It Shames Wisconsin Voters

By Dominique Paul Noth

Louis Butler Jr.

It took nine years after he wrote Thomas Vs. Mallet to see its full force conclusively confirmed in 2014 by the US 7th District Court of Appeals. But by then it had already been recognized and used in national court rulings and writings as a key modernization of traditional tort liability law. 

That 2005  Wisconsin Supreme Court decision sent Wisconsin Manufactures & Commerce (WMC) into full-throated $2.25 million ad  rage in 2008 to defeat the author, Justice Louis Butler Jr. It caused conniptions among national chemical plant CEOs -- denial and delay even after Butler was defeated,  then aggressive lobbying their friends in Madison under Gov. Scott Walker’s reign  to pass legislation  to prevent retroactivity in lead paint cases. Their 2011 revenge law was later ruled as (yet another) unconstitutional invasion by the GOP legislature into judicial sobriety. 

Though every court up to the US Supremes has rejected the chemical companies’ efforts to block Butler’s decision, and several courts have actually used it, the detractors didn’t stop yelling. You would think the 7th District in 2014 struck the blow to finally beat these squadrons of chemical company lawyers to their knees. But the machinery of legal challenges that corporation lawyers relied on means that not until 2016 will some 173 Milwaukee household cases involving lead paint poisoning move to juries or settlement. 

The children in these original cases (whose privacy deserves protection) are grown, dead, hospitalized or in several cases in prison or in some institution.

Justice delayed may not always mean justice denied, but don’t try to sell that to these families or to Louis Butler Jr.

Butler was clearly an ascending jurist – a state public defender, then a teacher of judges, a law professor, a municipal judge and elected Milwaukee circuit judge. It was actually his reputation for scholarly congeniality even more than progressive leanings and political ability that won appointment in 2004 by Gov. Doyle to the state supreme court.  He had actually run against Diane Sykes in 2000 and now was replacing her.

He was also the first African American justice on that bench. But in 2008 he also became the bench's first incumbent to be defeated since George Currie in 1967 (largely blamed for a ruling that let the Braves move to Atlanta  -- in other words, serious offense to the public, not destroying thousands of minds with poisoned paint chips).

News in the US is entering an era of headlines dominated by cases of pollution and toxicity involving not just lead paint in homes -- still a lively lingering issue as editor Bruce Murphy recently detailed -- but such growing problems as fracking, mining runoff, pipe ruptures, environmental spills and other poisoning of land and water.  Atty. Peter Earle (who has argued the lead paint responsibility issue in many state and national cases) says Butler’s 2008 decision was a “courageous ruling” that now plays a pioneer interpretive role in all tort cases of causation and liability.

Where once an industry could hide behind the plaintiff’s inability to identify the precise source -- Which of four area fracking companies fouled the water table? Or which of five manufacturers making lead paint could be held accountable despite gaps in 50 year old records? -- Butler’s decision helps a court and jury measure responsibility among residents, property owners and manufacturers in the same industry.  

Millwaukee Magazine photo of Peter Earle.

“Big business is terrified of this legal development,” Earle told me in a recent interview, “because it can be applied to similar situations in which generic toxic products are negligently produced on a massive scale and cause widespread harm.”  

You can still find remnants of big business’ misshapen attack on this thoughtful reasoning about liability in wrongful acts – without any awareness that time has redeemed the judge’s stances – on the WMC’s own website.

No one (at least until this writing)  has corrected WMC leader Jim Pugh’s 2013 crowing,  still calling Butler’s ruling a “guilty-until-proven-innocent standard” though lead paint manufacturers have been treated fairly in the few cases already using the standard.  Juries are smarter than WMC thinks. Pugh exposes why the trade group’s heavy hand and aggressive self-glorification annoy even the business people who want to balance their approach to profits with accountability to the public.

In California, Earle used Butler’s decision to open the door to win a massive public nuisance suit. This was  a $1.15 billion award to long thwarted  complainants in 10 California counties who argued that lead paint in their pre-1978 residences were known toxins to the active lead paint manufacturers of the time. The list of shared guilt includes many of the same players as Wisconsin cases -- Sherwin-Williams Co., DuPont, Atlantic Richfield and NL Industries (Dutch Boy paint, which has partly conceded, actually settling many claims in Wisconsin).  For this $1.15 billion victory, Californians recognized Earle and his team as lawyer of the year for 2014.  

In that decision (perhaps a prelude to more) historic documents deepened proof that the companies long knew yet marketed toxic products. This  included memos urging stores to keep lead paint out front in sales pitches and one saying the public wouldn’t care  since “most of the houses would be occupied by the colored and Puerto Ricans.”

In those times, the same companies “owned the mines, the smelters, the paint stores so it would affect their profits across the board,” Earle told me.

“Think of it this way,” he explained. “If ten manufacturers pollute a body of water with the same toxic chemical and hundreds of thousands of people are injured, should all the culpable companies be given immunity from liability simply because each individual victim cannot identify which?   [In the past] the tradition of tort law protected the  companies from any blame and transferred the cost of the damages onto the backs of the taxpayer.”

Earle bluntly believes Butler was punished for “legal heroism.”

While fuming in interviews about the lead paint ruling and Butler’s opposition to extreme financial caps on jury awards in medical malpractice cases, WMC actually downplayed business related rulings that the voters might applaud – such as Butler leading a high court majority to uphold a jury’s $94 million punitive damages award to widows and families against Mitsubishi in the giant crane collapse at Miller Park in 1999 that killed three iron workers. (A statue of remembrance reminds the public of the tragedy as they enter the park). 

The WMC ads and other third party ads of growing viciousness from Club for Growth and particularly the  Coalition for America's Families (nearly $500,000 in lurid crime ads)  played most heavily on the public misconception that the supreme court deals directly with criminals rather than issues like admissible evidence and liability procedures. 

But the worst and most successful lie, relying on unstudied citizenry swayed by throat-clench "law and order” rhetoric and racist stereotypes, came from his opponent, a state judge, Michael Gableman. The April voters to their everlasting shame ate up this “Loophole Louie” slur that crowded the airwaves with a ferocity that negated the campaigning in Butler’s favor. 
  
Today Gableman is the bombastic bullfrog on the high court, the buffoon relegated to easy rulings or obviously partisan platitude cases.  (Not just my opinion but those of many seasoned observers who speculated that the other justices were too smart to be out front in such hyperbolic rulings as the John Doe case.)  

In that 2008 campaign, with well over 4,000 radio and TV ads against Butler, it was Gableman’s untruth that got the most media mileage (he was after all, a judge and wouldn’t blatantly invent, would he?), reaching falsely back to Butler’s early career as a public defender. 

“It’s being compared to the Willie Horton ad from the 1988 presidential campaign,” reported  one 2008 contemporary fact-checking account, detailing how the contents did Horton one better by featuring side by side two black men – one smiling justice, one glaring rapist, both in black and white images compared to the full color ruddy plump conservative. 

“This ad falsely implies that Butler was responsible for freeing the rapist and allowing him to commit another sexual assault,” the report detailed. “Actually, Butler failed to win the man’s release as public defender. The rapist served his sentence and didn’t commit his next crime until he had been paroled. . .  So Butler didn’t ‘find a loophole’ as this ad claims [video of ad included in the link]. He convinced the appeals court that the trial judge had allowed the jury to hear prejudicial information, which is just what appeals lawyers are supposed to do.”

Gableman was excoriated by ethical experts from all camps for the ad and ever since he has been dodging censure, which is easier with a justice title and right-wing money and politicians to watch your back.


The article from the era also described this:  “A second ad, sponsored by a business trade group [WMC], says Butler ‘almost jeopardized’ a murder prosecution. But in fact, Butler was the sole dissenter in a 6-1 verdict” about evidence.

And just this September 9, his dissent was vindicated in the 7th District order of a new trial for Mark Jensen. 

“The letter from the grave,” Butler chuckled in a recent interview. “Most of the money spent by independents on radio and TV was about this case.”

But all Butler argued was to disallow the “letter from the grave” in the Jensen murder trial, where it was wielded mightily to convict him. So this was never an argument about guilt or innocence in the poison death of Jensen’s wife, but just about inadmissible evidence in a domestic situation. Later courts have all agreed with Butler.

State-paid lawyers were ordered to embrace that old WMC nostrum and spent big taxpayer money to fight for the "letter from the grave" as it was used in the trial, even after a federal judge vacated the Jensen conviction in 2013 along the grounds Butler argued.

The 7th appeals court panel this month confirmed the conviction should be voided,  leaving the state with the options of appeal to the full court or the US Supreme Court (both doubtful), freedom for Jensen or a new trial.

We’re not done with this litany of vindication for Butler because other ads dragged out the Ralph D.  Armstrong murder case to label Butler “soft on crime” for “leading the high court” to vacate his 1981 murder conviction.

But it was clear even in 2008 and more so now with the state’s own dismissal of all charges that there was overwhelming evidence of prosecutorial misconduct and false DNA evidence. Armstrong’s freedom was developed by the Innocence Project and pointed the way to another culprit.  This case is now called without quotes an “unlawful homicide conviction” in news stories this May when the federal appeals court allowed Armstrong, who spent 29 years in prison, to sue the prosecutor and several lab workers for hiding “potentially exculpable evidence.”  So, it seems, Butler is not soft on crime but hard on evidence.

The attack on Butler didn’t end with Gableman’s close victory. It destroyed his earned path to high office.  Continuing right-wing enmity in the US Senate blocked three attempts by President Obama to name him a federal judge. 

It’s easy to blame his 2008 loss on an ignorant public led by their law and order fears, but let’s reserve much of the blame to the voters who stayed home, as so many do in these April elections, not realizing the price they pay at the local and judicial level for decades into the future. Many of the educated and supposedly thoughtful citizenry saw that filthy black and white ad -- it was everywhere -- but apparently weren’t disgusted enough to vote. A representative democracy still depends on who turns out.

Butler's law firm portrait

Maybe that’s why Butler today doesn’t foam at the mouth as many of his friends and supporters do about what was done to him.

He’s still a busy lawyer in Milwaukee for the nation’s largest minority-owned law firm, Gonzalez Saggio & Harlan, and an active student of judiciary developments. A robust 63 years of age, he is regularly courted to return to elected office. (Editor's Note: In May 2016 Butler became attorney at  DeWitt Ross & Stevens Law Firm.)

Butler is well aware -- from lead paint to Miller Park to criminal case lies -- how thoroughly he has been vindicated.

Though denied the bench for years, think of this. While  most of the remaining Wisconsin high judiciary has fallen into disrepute and nationwide ridicule, it is his reasoning and decisions that continue to earn nationwide respect and influence.

When asked recently how he felt about it all, he simply responded:

“I lost my job for doing my job.” 

About the author: Noth has been  a professional journalist since the 1960s, first as national, international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then as an editor for its original Green Sheet, also  for almost two decades the paper’s film and drama critic. He also created its Friday Weekend section and ran Sunday TV Screen magazine and Lively Arts as he became the newspaper’s senior feature editor. He was tapped by the publishers of the combining Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for special projects and as first online news producer before voluntarily departing in the mid-1990s to run online news seminars and write on public affairs and Internet and consumer news. From 2002 to 2013 he ran the Milwaukee Labor Press as editor. It served as the Midwest’s largest home-delivered labor newspaper, with archives at milwaukeelabor.org.  In that role he won top awards yearly until the paper stopped publishing in 2013. His investigative pieces and extensive commentaries are now published by several news outlets as well as his culture and politics outlets known as Dom's Domain.  He also reviews theater for urbanmilwaukee.com. 

COULD CHANGE IN MILWAUKEE CHAIR POINT TO NEW ELECTION TACTICS?

By Dominique Paul Noth

Lipscomb seems to have the votes

My educated guess is that, a few hours after I write this,  Theodore Lipscomb  will be elected new Milwaukee County board chair. On July 30 he seems to have the votes locked up against announced opponents and fellow supervisors Willie Johnson and Michael Mayo.

There are many reasons for my advance guesswork, but I go further.  This changing of the guard as Marina Dimitrijevic steps aside  is hardly a retreat in the face of money and GOP influence but the first salvo in winnable small ball,  girding for political and government battle to take Wisconsin district by district toward  progressive ideals in jobs, pay, equanimity and public education. 

That’s putting a lot of tea leaves and brave hopes  on a simple torch passing of internal leadership from one veteran supervisor to another in a technically nonpartisan situation.  Especially since it  will be largely interpreted in mainstream media  as a victory for the political gamesmanship of County Executive Chris Abele.

But it may actually herald a growing coalition against  him as well as conviction that,  in Milwaukee and around the state,  energy and ideas now must do more than ever against  bullying money – and brace yourself for some deep tactical surprises.

What prompted this speedy election on the board was that Dimitrijevic, while retaining her role as 4th District supervisor, announced that she was stepping down from the chair. This came after news she was being courted to be state chapter president of the Working Families Party.

Though often described as a minor “third party,” Working Families actually functions in many regions as a fusion party, pushing larger progressive principles but open to run its  own candidates or goad Democratic candidates and even the occasional Republican on social concerns.  Its growth has been as dynamic as the concerns:  higher minimum wage, public education, higher taxes on and less escape loopholes for the rich, jobs, health care, student debt crisis, universal paid leave,  smarter energy policies and environmental reform – you choose the order depending on locale and need. A popular agenda with teeth and a determination not to be distracted by personality sideshows.  

The party was founded in New York State in the late 1990s, and has now expanded to several other states, hoping to add a vibrant Wisconsin chapter at just the appropriate time, which seems right now.  It has sometimes run its own folks but often cross-pollinates.  It has not been without turmoil since like the civil rights movement it believes in pushing complacent citizenry into mass action. It seeks to apply pressure for candidates to honor their commitment to working families (often claimed but only sometimes followed through).  That determination sometimes creates conflicts with more cautious public figures.

Among the successes of its campaign methods are Connecticut Gov. Dan Malloy and US  Sen. Chris Murphy, Oregon’s US  Sen. Jeff Merkley, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (who seems to now balk on some commitments),  New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio  and, in a famous case of bucking Democratic establishment politics,   feisty New York City Public Advocate Letitia James, who won in a landslide.

Jennifer Epps-Addison, already a familiar activist.

So their power in state elections should not be underestimated and in this state their prime movers include the new president of the Milwaukee teachers union, Kim Schroeder, and the ardent leader of Wisconsin Jobs Now, Jennifer Epps-Addison.

Dimitrijevic has not yet accepted the position as state leader, and that may affect the timing of how long she stays in her District 4 job. But it is clearly a sign that rather than turning to the most flamethrower progressive out there the Working Families has set its sights on a proven conciliator.

In earlier interviews, Dimitrijevic laughingly recalled that when she was first elected supervisor more than a decade ago as its youngest woman member ever, only she and Gerry Broderick could be categorized as leaning left.  Yet as chairman she has herded and often united a diverse crowd that defies the simplistic right and left labels into uniform advances on green technology, repaired finances, better health care, aging and transit initiatives – and frankly, a lot of developments including downtown construction that Abele likes to take credit for.  Yet Abele seems to have spread the myth of the board as interfering with what he calls progress and what many observers call his autocracy. 

Come April the state legislature will use Act 14 to cut the pay of county supervisors in half to $24,000 a year. The theory was that only rich conservatives could afford to take a full time job at part-time pay.  The opposite is proving true. So far vacancies on the board have been filled from the left and active middle, not the right. That may say something about who is willing to work hard for little money at public service.

It may also explain why Lipscomb is the obvious choice. He is regarded on the board as fierce for the people’s rights in county government, supportive of special hiring efforts for the inner city, aggressive on the board’s legislative power, stubborn on projects and prudent on finances, so he is likely to draw votes right and left, black and white.  

Lipscomb has troubled some progressives over his commitment to keeping the Estrabook Dam, which many believe is almost a family heirloom. Others see his support as listening to his district or opposing Abele’s love of vetoes. But his stand is opposed by major ecologists and groups like the Riverkeepers who frankly want to see the Dam blown out of the Milwaukee River. Today many supervisors who will vote for him say he should not expect their continued protection on this particular fetish. 

Dimitrijevic anticipated to take new role

Dimitrijevic may certainly be seeking a family supporting job but also an even more active role to change the political landscape.  She is used to a world where internal fortitude and diplomatic maneuvers are more respected than party labels. 

But unquestionably Abele and the state GOP had to know the roots of Democratic and progressive politics have been formed around the nonpartisan support achieved by many supervisors, and that was being attacked in offering them part time pay for a job that remains full time for the dedicated.  That is why Act 14 is clearly not about more efficient government but punishing resistance.

Dimitrijevic hasn’t said, but she may want to remove herself as  a lightning rod to reveal the depth of discomfort over Abele’s methods.  She knows the media liked to pretend it was personal. Now they‘ll know differently. 

Walker has helped make the time ripe for the Working Families change in Wisconsin, many of its leaders feel,  by exposing his  ineptitude and vanity to national scrutiny,  throwing Wisconsin to the wolves in his budget as he ogles the White House. 

In that atmosphere, Abele’s behavior moves from savvy to rancid. He  was actually elected county executive in 2011  to correct the tilted ship of Walker, with deep expectations he would listen to all sides of the issues.  But then out of impatience with democracy he adopted Walker methods, leading many in the courthouse, even  his own managers,  to refer to him as Walker-Lite.

Independently well-off because of inherited money, Abele was described to me  by a Republican business associate as “brimming with ideas I wouldn’t put a farthing behind.”  To be fair, some ideas may in desperation (fear of losing the Bucks)  be worth a gamble, though without more facts I sure wouldn’t bet on his county-harming methods of funding a new Arena – including giving away $8 million in land for a dollar a parcel because the pace of natural economic development  is not fast enough to keep the 1% engaged in Milwaukee growth.

But at least the worst ideas of Abele in that funding muddle were eliminated though we are still left with a $4 million a year hole for 20 years on the very county taxpayers he was supposed to protect. The county board hasn’t been left with much room to improve his meandering, nor has the Common Council, but both are looking hard.

Abele used his largesse to endear himself to the GOP and run rough over the Democratic Party establishment while advertising himself as a Democrat at heart because of his lavish support of LBGT causes, international feminism and Shakespearean arts. At least some Democrats are now skeptical not just of Abele but what claims  their party label permits.

His imperialistic manner offends several on the county board who might be in his ideological camp on key issues. They still want respect for their role -- and as long as he denies them that,  the board will become more combative. 

And in the last weeks Madison has come  under pressure from some well heeled conservatives to rein Abele in – they fear his loose cannon  as much as more liberal factions do. Many I'm told were connected to the Milwaukee Art Museum, which is working with the county board on an O'Donnell Park deal.

Once the state conservatives seemed willing to curtail  the legislative body of Milwaukee County in a manner they would not dare attempt in any of the other 71 counties (and they sure didn’t do for Walker). Claiming expediency but really hoping to nibble away at a Democratic stronghold, they gave much of the  power on land sales and regulatory oversight to Abele, not to the county board they regard as the area’s political base of active voters.

That seemed to work when he gave away Park East parcels for the Bucks. But there’s  a backfire in his understanding of complex federal regulations and in playing favorites in who gets first crack at the deals.  His authority isn’t sitting well with members of the business community who aren’t on the inside and know some regulations are needed to level the playing field.

As legislative experts dip inside the new Act 999, they sense Madison left the county board with more powers  than Abele  wanted, and opened the door to public hearings and  court actions that affect everything from Arena funding to arts funds to  Park East land sales. So there may be some provocative moves left for the county board if they pinpoint where Abele has been given too much control. 

“The public may wake up tomorrow to see their beloved airport privatized from under them without any say – that’s how extreme has been his takeover and so willing has been the state to lift the controls” noted Supervisor Broderick, who has long indicated he will retire in 2016.

Other observers have detected a pattern of capable outspoken experts unable to work with what one privately called “Abele’s Howard Hughes side.” The list is long – Sue Black, fired from running county parks and now heading Arizona’s park system under a Republican governor; several chiefs of staff and department heads; Frank Busalacchi, who still won’t discuss why he left a key county position after working with – and arguing with – Gov. Jim Doyle as head of the state department of transportation, and the interesting tale of  Terry Slaybaugh, the Mitchell airport director who within months scrambled back to his previous Dayton  job. All he originally told an interviewer was unhappiness at being “heavily managed by his bosses” at Milwaukee County.  A later orchestration by Abele’s office to blame the county board for his unhappiness has had few takers.

No wonder some conservatives are now asking for better controls on Abele, just as more progressives and moderates in Walkerland are open to new tactics and precise goals – and maybe even new party labels.

About the author: Noth has been  a professional journalist since the 1960s, first as national, international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then as an editor for its original Green Sheet, also  for almost two decades the paper’s film and drama critic. He also created its Friday Weekend section and ran Sunday TV Screen magazine and Lively Arts as he became the newspaper’s senior feature editor. He was tapped by the publishers of the combining Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for special projects and as first online news producer before voluntarily departing in the mid-1990s to run online news seminars and write on public affairs and Internet and consumer news. From 2002 to 2013 he ran the Milwaukee Labor Press as editor. It served as the Midwest’s largest home-delivered labor newspaper, with archives at milwaukeelabor.org.  In that role he won top awards yearly until the paper stopped publishing in 2013. His investigative pieces and extensive commentaries are now published by several news outlets as well as his culture and politics outlets known as Dom's Domain.  He also reviews theater for urbanmilwaukee.com. 

EXPLORING WHY SCALIA’S DIATRIBES KEEP GETTING VERSE

It's no longer a case of assuming
What sends Scalia fuming
His mind gets unfettered
When others write better
His reputation entombing.

By Dominique Paul Noth

Final part of Kennedy's remarkable same sex marriage decision

The week of  June 22 was the worst of Antonin Scalia’s reputation on the US Supreme Court. He went  ballistic on the losing side of both Obamacare and same sex marriage.

The longest ensconced justice (President Reagan, 1986) -- self-proclaimed as the outstanding wordsmith of the right (Ruth Bader Ginsburg is generally so acknowledged on the left), famous for assigned decisions and caustic dissents laced with erudite  flights of fancy and  abrasive superiority -- Scalia has been tolerated and even taught in law schools for a gift of language and an insistence on textual interpretation.

Basically here’s his concept of originalism involving the laws and the Constitution -- they only say what they mean according to Scalia.  It is a sometimes laughable theory that underneath promotes legal attention to textual purpose -- extremely confrontational but lively fodder for debate.

Yet of late his excursions into musing pompous language and offhand  insults have come a  major cropper – tending to make the pinhead side of conservatism even more litigious  and sending even Federalist Society lawyers scurrying from knee-jerk Scaliastic acceptance.

Moreover, reason-based conservatives on the court have been writing rings around him by focusing on balancing values within the laws -- even turning his own interpretations against him.

Only Scalia and Ginsburg have earned operatic stature for their personalities and phraseology. But as her reputation for insight ascends, Falstaff has descended to buffoon arias of rage. 

Recently, comity thrown to the winds,  his invective was aimed at that Reagan White House  pup John Roberts (sure he’s 60 but Scalia is 79 and thought he had a new acolyte) who   regularly fails to succumb in deference to his elder (who wanted that chief justice job 10 years ago). 

Now Roberts is certainly no progressive’s ideal of  a justice. He’s hardly  free from obeisance to  the wealthy right or entrenched Babbittry. But in the case of the Affordable Care Act that might have actually helped. It was not just Obama backers but  the business community that saw financial calamity in undoing ACA despite some 56 times the House GOP voted to repeal it.  Wall Street needed a pragmatic jurist reaching logically beyond flame-thrower politics.

Roberts upholds Obamacare  and
again draws Scalia's wrath.

Roberts’  first decision in 2012 upheld the legislative legality of ACA as a taxing initiative. Then his second this June 25  wrote the clincher opinion that puts ACA beyond reasonable reach of congressional enemies.  As pundit Andy Borowitz laughingly pointed out in The New Yorker, Roberts’ opinion has forced  Reince Preibus and the GOP to search for a new anti-Obama myth to attack. 

Actually it wasn’t even close, 6-3, since Roberts was joined by the other remaining Reagan justice, Anthony Kennedy (1988), long regarded as a swing vote but ideologically more attuned with Scalia. In the first ACA case, he and Scalia were on the same side of the  constitutional  issue,  but last week they parted ways because it was an interpretation of the intent of the statute, and normally the conclusion was so inevitable it would be a petty waste of the court’s time to even take it up. Except ACA opponents anticipated that Scalia’s fondness for textual sleight of hand might bring other conservatives around.

But sometimes the justices agree to take a Hail Mary pass in order to permanently spike it. Kennedy joined Roberts in going to  the heart of the case, ignoring the Scalia attempt to isolate four words (“established by the State”) from the overriding language that the federal government had on a cabinet level authorized  “such Exchanges” including subsidies. In fact, Scalia’s selective lifting could only carry along Sam Alito and Clarence Thomas.

Roberts is a sturdy opinion writer but there was something more powerful than routine scholarship in his quotations from past decisions (“We cannot interpret federal statutes to negate their own stated purposes”) and in his straight to the point summation: “Congress passed the Affordable Care Act to improve health insurance markets, not to destroy them. If at all possible, we must interpret the Act in a way that is consistent with the former, and avoids the latter.” 

But he couldn’t resist an ironic slam at Scalia’s dissent in the first ACA case that admitted  “without federal subsides the Exchanges cannot operate as Congress intended,” confirming even Scalia really knew what Congress wanted. 

In dissent Scalia was forced to "wholeheartedly agree with the Court that sound interpretation requires paying attention to the whole law, not honing in on isolated words or even isolated sections."  But falsely hone in he did and went linguistically childish because Roberts was using workmanlike accuracy to show him up. 

He demeaned Roberts’  reasoning with a disconnected fruity harrumph ("Pure applesauce”) and turned to old Scottish insults ("jiggery-pokery") that didn’t address diddly.  Prof. Ed Fallone in a  Marquette University blog has more brilliantly than any layman could explained how sound Roberts’ reasoning was and truer to the “ancient principle of statutory interpretation”  that Scalia keeps pretending to defend.

With a fetish for verbal diarrhea
That angry old justice Scalia
His colleagues to harm ‘em
Became P.T. Barnum
With hokum of hoary Anglophilia

Scalia’s manner became even more unhinged and personal the next day (June 26) when Scotus 5-4 declared a constitutional right to same sex marriage in the secular realm.

The main opinion came from Kennedy, who has shown previous sensitivity to homosexual freedom from government persecution. In 1996 he struck down a Colorado state amendment that classified  homosexuals “not to further a proper legislative end but to make them unequal to everyone else.” In 2003 he invalidated an anti-sodomy law that “involves liberty of the person.” In 2013 in a landmark case his opinion struck down key components of DOMA (Defense of Marriage Act) and likely opened the door to gay advocates looking at the  hundreds of state regulations denying gays what one man one woman marriages were allowed.

Kennedy's eloquence comes
under attack

But even these advocates, I suspect, didn’t anticipate the reach,  breadth and power of Kennedy’s articulate validation. Calling marriage the “keystone of our social order,” he insisted that  "no longer may this liberty be denied" the homosexual community, as it was long denied interracial couples. He actually elevated the importance of marriage for all.

In this case, Roberts was on the other side, acknowledging the social value of gay couples (“Many will rejoice in this decision and I begrudge none of their celebration”) and suggesting that they might win his support as a legislator. But he insisted it was too sweeping a decision (reducing his brethren to “five lawyers” not jurists in his ire) and was  defying judicial caution and the lengthy traditions of only opposite sex marriage, even citing the values of the Kalahari Bushmen, the Carthaginians and the Aztecs to support his notion.

(That comment brought a swift response in Slate June 27  from a respected judge on the federal 7th District Court of Appeals who has been considered for the highest court, Richard A. Posner. Calling Roberts dissent “heartless”  Posner described the long history of social persecution suffered by the gay community and poked fun at Roberts’ example.  “Most of us are not convinced that what’s good enough for the Bushmen, the Carthaginians, and the Aztecs should be good enough for us. Ah, the millennia! Ah, the wisdom of ages! How arrogant it would be to think we knew more than the Aztecs — we who don’t even know how to cut a person’s heart out of his chest while he's still alive, a maneuver they were experts at.”)

Even Roberts had to acknowledge that “injustices” such as civil rights are often not recognized in their  own time. But he still fulminated about a major disruption in the social order by letting the court lead the people. One can imagine how such private contrary discussions on the court  invigorated Kennedy’s language throughout, thusly:

“Without the recognition, stability and predictability marriage offers, their children suffer the stigma of knowing their families are somehow lesser. They also suffer the significant material costs of being raised by unmarried parents, relegated through no fault of their own to a more difficult and uncertain family life. The marriage laws at issue here thus harm and humiliate the children of same-sex couples.”

In this era of economic, family and social pressure, the polls suggest nearly 43% of opposite sex couples are living together or  raising children without benefit of marriage, so soured have they become on the institution.  Seen in that light, Kennedy has done more to magnify the importance and special legal protections of marriage for all Americans.

That was missed by Scalia in a dissent so unbridled that  Roberts pointedly refused to sign aboard though he was on the same side.

Angered by Kennedy's eloquence
In poetic gay marriage defense
What emanates from Scalia
Is fury akin to Sharia
Ego offended by his own irrelevance.

Scalia railed at what he sarcastically saw as the majority’s presumption: “These justices know that limiting marriage to one man and one woman is contrary to reason; they know that an institution as old as government itself, and accepted by every nation in history until 15 years ago, cannot possibly be supported by anything other than ignorance or bigotry.”  Strange language given Scotus’ central role in settling issues brought before the court. Stranger still that it was not true unless talking about Christian countries.  It made it easy to interpret his tirade as more religious in nature than based on understanding of human rights  and the pain of denial, which clearly is what moved the majority to action.

Even religious and conservative leaders thought Kennedy rose to such memorable language  out of compassion and belief  in the power of the law to correct error. Not Scalia.
“The opinion is couched in a style that is as pretentious as its content is egotistic,” Scalia wrote of his Reagan colleague’s work, not thinking for a moment of how pretentious and egotistic much of his own writing sounds. “The opinion’s showy profundities are often profoundly incoherent.”

If there was any doubt that Scalia has strayed from
jurisprudence, dissents prove it.

Scalia seems upset by Kennedy’s phrase-making to the point that he “would hide my head in a bag” rather than write such stuff and even seemed to accuse Kennedy of being bought or catering to public opinion. What struck others as florid elegance became to Scalia a signal that the court “has descended from the disciplined legal reasoning of John Marshall and Joseph Story to the mystical aphorisms of the fortune cookie.”

It is a valuable sidebar to point out that chief justice Marshall (1801-1835) solidified acceptance of the court as the independent branch by pushing the politics of the times and conservative Story (1811-1845) didn’t just expand the property rights of rich white men he also vehemently opposed the slave trade. Part of their “disciplined reasoning” was stretching the norms of  society.

Scalia’s attacks on his colleagues for seeing the rights issue differently  reminded several devout federalists of the warnings of a Founding Father, Georgia educator Abraham Baldwin, who actually didn’t want the US Constitution to name the rights reserved to governments, arguing that "If we enumerate specific rights, then some fool in the future will argue that people are entitled only to those rights and no others."  

Scalia sure sounded like that fuming fool in his dissent especially when he suggested that the court should not defend anything other than rights regarded as “fundamental by every person alive at the time of ratification”  of the Constitution.  He also insisted that gay marriage eroded the rights of the non-beatniks (“One would think Freedom of Intimacy is abridged rather than expanded by marriage. Ask the nearest hippie.”) and derided the majority justices for where they came from and where they go to church (six are actually Catholics). 

Incoherently this was his own  brand of  activism disguised as originalism, even insisting that it ought to take super-legislative action to change the civil definition of marriage, ignoring the expanded role government today plays in marriage rights.

Yet as nasty as many view his dissent, it was less brutal and close-minded than what sprang from Thomas. He suggested the damage done by the government to the LBGTs  who want to marry was grossly exaggerated. “All people have dignity,” he began, stating the obvious. “Human dignity cannot be taken away by the government. Slaves did not lose their dignity (any more than they lost their humanity) because the government allowed them to be enslaved. Those held in internment camps did not lose their dignity because the government confined them. And those denied governmental benefits certainly do not lose their dignity because the government denies them those benefits. The government cannot bestow dignity, and it cannot take it away.”

The view that government has no role in advancing human dignity is hard to swallow on any side.  But at least another dissenter, Alito, focused on a more frequent if ridiculous worry -- that religions that resist same sex marriages will be mocked into agreement.  The secular decision  “will be used to vilify Americans who are unwilling to assent to the new orthodoxy,” Alito wrote. “In the course of its opinion, the majority compares traditional marriage laws to laws that denied equal treatment for African-Americans and women. The implications of this analogy will be exploited by those who are determined to stamp out every vestige of dissent” – in other words intimidating churchgoers to give in.

Alito’s fear implies the religious will react violently or are easily swayed in their convictions. He suffers from horrible timing.  If nothing else on a different issue of terrorist massacre, the religious in Charleston have just demonstrated extraordinary charity, tolerance and forgiveness of a racist while peacefully insisting on their rights.

That is the analogy most people will see, not Alito's scare tactics. No wonder Kennedy believes we are mature enough.  Maturity vs. appeals to fear are becoming a determinative factor in American progress.  

The ruling reaffirms the freedom of religion, the value of marriage  and tells the government to keep its nose out of what couples can enjoy full legal recognition of marriage.

Scalia’s colleagues still rely on his First Amendment passion, particularly on issues he has long felt strongly about, such as the ambiguity in California law that sentences the convicted to longer terms than needed. So he was chosen to write that 7-1 opinion issued June 26 (California vs. Johnson). 

But it was a bone after the  enormous double whammy that left him pushing words around too loosely and way off target, insulting colleagues on the right even more than the left.

No wonder his  reputation for ferocity no longer scares people or carries that old ideological weight.

Once praised as a master word hustler
Scalia is commonly outmuscled 
He’s been left in a lather
And reduced to blather
Not once but twice out rustled 

With all apologies to Edward Lear

About the author: Noth has been  a professional journalist since the 1960s, first as national, international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then as an editor for its original Green Sheet, also  for almost two decades the paper’s film and drama critic. He also created its Friday Weekend section and ran Sunday TV Screen magazine and Lively Arts as he became the newspaper’s senior feature editor. He was tapped by the publishers of the combining Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for special projects and as first online news producer before voluntarily departing in the mid-1990s to run online news seminars and write on public affairs and Internet and consumer news. From 2002 to 2013 he ran the Milwaukee Labor Press as editor. It served as the Midwest’s largest home-delivered labor newspaper, with archives at milwaukeelabor.org.  In that role he won top awards yearly until the paper stopped publishing in 2013. His investigative pieces and extensive commentaries are now published by several news outlets as well as his culture and politics outlets known as Dom's Domain.  He also reviews theater for urbanmilwaukee.com.

ALDERMEN MAKE COST TO MPS, IN-HOUSE OVERSIGHT ESSENTIAL TO FUTURE CHARTER SCHOOL DEALS

By Dominique Paul Noth

JS coverage rushed past the innovative scrutiny of
Ald. Kovac's winning ordinances June 11.

A five year moratorium on City Hall creating charter schools had become a symbolic cause of the Stop MPS Takeover movement and drew an overflow crowd of worried charter supporters and anxious MPS families to the June 11 hearing by the influential Common Council Steering & Rules Committee.

The only newspaper coverage of the hearing by Journal Sentinel missed the heart of what actually happened – a three to one victory for more scrupulous public standards and a deliberate set of barriers if not absolute halt to the creation of more city authorized charter schools. 

Nor did any establishment media touch the primary motive for tabling the moratorium proposal. 

Most aldermen thought that idea was too easy to reverse in future council votes and probably too aggressive a stick in the eye of the Madison legislature. The state, alas, has the purse strings and legislative authority to take away the Common Council’s power to approve its own schools. 

Not that the aldermen didn’t sympathize with or share the outrage at the interference from Madison by this constantly evolving Darling-Kooyenga K-12 hustle, whose autocratic motives and clumsy research leap off the pages of their original fancy brochure proposal. 

Except the Darling-Kooyenga hustle wasn’t in front of the aldermen. They just didn’t like the strategy of the ordinance author, Ald. Tony Zielinksi. Some also took Zielinski’s effort as overwrought opportunism to court votes since next April he faces a former school board member, Meagan Holman, who has sometimes supported charter projects.  They may agree on the bubble-headedness emanating from Madison, but local officials are touchy if proposed ordinances seem too obviously election motivated.

So without the charter movement crowd or the reporter much noticing, in two new ordinances sponsored by vice chair Nik Kovac the panel required the Charter School Review Committee (CSRC) to add to its evaluation criteria the financial impact on MPS of any new school considered. That puts the onus back on how the state uses taxpayer money for schools and forces the Common Council to acknowledge up front its culpability in MPS fortunes.

The committee also imposed controls that will shut down the often automatic financial spigot enjoyed by Howard Fuller and his Marquette University Institute for the Transformation of Learning. (Approved city charters almost routinely receive large federal startup grants.)

Look in vain inside the JS story for information about these major changes and even the rebuke to CSRC chair Jeanette Mitchell for not providing aldermen with better information. 

Quietly the aldermen had recognized that something needed to be done about the flawed funding formula that means every new charter it allowed was stealing money from MPS and fudging the income and population realities of the city.  Meanwhile the runaway train that is Wisconsin’s current government continues to expand the failed voucher and charter models. 

It may not want to be but City Hall is part of the problem.  Of the city’s 10 charter schools with more than 3,200 students, only its downtown Montessori exceeds expectations (as it did long before it was a city charter) while the others often fail expectations. 

Some converted from voucher schools because they would gain more taxpayer money as charters.  A few are sincerely meant with new ideas for teaching, but struggle with staff and accountability goals. Others are part of the trend of national chains selling lower-cost promises, a revolving door of novice low-paid teachers, babysitting video games masked as education and friendliness at the entrance steps while actually treating kids as a new profit center, yet all these still lag in academic performance.

No wonder many in the movement had come to think of city charter approval as a pushover.

Until June 11. To the surprise of many MPS advocates who regard the city as unsympathetic, the committee insisted on better results and higher scrutiny. (How can Madison attack that?) What they passed will make it more difficult for charter approval and probably force re-examination of previously approved chains expecting slam-dunk expansion. The decisions linked any further growth of city charter schools to performance and professional in-house oversight – something like MPS is doing with its own charter schools, including those that chart their own course and those that follow existing training and union pay standards.

It’s been little touted that Wisconsin’s most successful charter schools are the tightly monitored ones of both sorts run by public school districts. 

The simplistic pros and cons of the charter, voucher and MPS debate brought an abnormally high turnout for this hearing – but that doesn’t excuse how Vivian Wang's JS story  didn’t see the nuances or the undercurrents. That brought complaints about the story from elected officials. Several aldermen felt their shrewd attempt at balance was overlooked. They learned the hard way that the intellectual colors of past journalism have vanished and today’s Milwaukee newspaper, in terms of thoughtfulness, is printed in black and white.

City Clerk Jim Owczarski moved in

One new ordinance turns over to respected City Clerk Jim Owczarski and his publicly accountable staff the office duties once controlled by Fuller’s people.

Owczarski confirmed in an interview that his public officials will be “taking over the staffing of meetings, posting of agendas, taking of minutes, and will likely work on the custodianship of records.”  The Marquette institute will assist in the application and monitoring process rather than staffing or even holding meetings in its own space, something that the Common Council didn’t at first know was happening when it selected this Catholic university division as  review agent. It has only belatedly realized how many schools guided through the city process were connected to groups and conduits Fuller was part of. 

The city also pledged June 11 that all future meetings of the CSRC will be televised – and miked, which hasn’t always been the case. 

The aldermen are tightening up, demanding deeper better reports from a CSRC  appointed equally by the mayor and the president of the Common Council (with the comptroller adding a financial officer). Under departed council president Willie Hines, whose appointments still dominate, the process drew constant citizen complaints of being too obedient to Fuller’s power plays in the national charter school network. Marva Herndon of Women Informed noted she was hopeful after “years of fighting with them” because this new action acknowledges what her group wanted -- recognition that “the Common Council was responsible for the CSRC” and that the past process “was not transparent.”  

Ald. Michael Murphy in charge.

The new council president, Ald. Michael Murphy, cannot be regarded as an MPS or MTEA proponent. He is respected for a crisp studious air and an understanding of compromise politics. He has been criticized for not being tough enough on charter and voucher schools, such as backing away from a stricter ordinance requiring playgrounds at all elementary schools, preferring a milder approach. He even chastised a research minded advocate from a community organization for public education, Schools and Communities United, that “your interest does not lie in the improvement and proper supervision of charter schools but their elimination,” sternly reaffirming Murphy’s  legal obligation.

He may not yet realize he is protecting a vapid ordinance written loosely in the 1990s, but at least he’s trying to tighten the system around it.

Consider the wishy-washy mandate in city ordinances: “The proposed school will operate an education program that has a reasonable prospect of providing Milwaukee children a good education.” 

“Reasonable prospect”? That’s a low standard, hardly a match for the original vision of charter schools. That was to innovate on methods and specialties or, as former president Bill Clinton succinctly explained, “They’re supposed to do a better job educating students.”

But during the Clinton era the city set up shop with a definition that has stretched the meaning of “reasonable prospect” beyond reasonable recognition. The original ordinance didn’t require annual external accounting to the public but at least required an annual academic “scorecard” from the respected Children’s Research Center (CRC), a division of the National Council on Crime and Delinquency. It still mystifies citizens that schools that didn’t score well or didn’t show advancement in the past were given multiple second chances by the city system, but it becomes clearer when you look at the limp wording of the original ordinance.

Now it’s Murphy fielding lingering complaints from parents and community groups about what even fellow aldermen call “abysmal” results and in philosophical musings he has demeaned the attitude that to benefit the minority community aldermen can let in schools with persistent low outcomes "because they mean well.”  

So the hearing revealed a new balance. Murphy wants the city to keep its power to create schools but seems troubled about the consequences, including punishing MPS with every new student and keeping alive several schools previously identified as laggards.  

Murphy on June 11 saw that both sides were primed for a prolonged debate over the Zielinski proposal with signs, children, speakers and more. The MPS parents and teens who arrived early for the hearing were somehow pushed to the back rows while the later-arriving T-shirt emblazoned Rocketship parents, middle school children and charter forces armed with green placards took the prominent rows before the cameras – a common public relations ploy of using children in the education debate.  But there were so many in both camps that dozens more were relegated to the overflow chamber down the hall (many muttered it was just the same as staying home and watching it all on the access channel). 

To the disappointment of the well prepared, Murphy shut down any public testimony (avoiding not just redundancy but the likelihood that the meeting would stretch into the evening). After minimal debate he sped to setting aside the Zielinski proposal – all with studious goodwill. These actions cleverly pulled attention away from the ordinances that vice chair Kovac had previously introduced and been smoothly passed. 

Murphy, as one wag put it, “runs a great railroad.” With brisk businesslike manner he made sure all aldermen had time to speak. It was an exercise in intelligent politics.  Even Stop MPS Takeover advocates were impressed at the positive results, crediting their “shovel and spade work,” as one put it.  “Dare I say hopeful?” one member told colleagues.

Clearly it is a different world from the Hines days and the Fuller rubber stamp even if it wasn’t the moratorium some wanted as they see all the out of town evils descending on MPS. But the demand for real proof of important educational gains deepened when the panel pulled back an outrageous but previously routine  request for a new five-year contract for the still on-probation King’s Academy, giving the new principal only two years to live up to her promises.

On June 14, even the JS veteran education reporter, Alan Borsuk, took notice, though buried near the end of a Sunday  Q&A “primer” for novices on what charter schools are and aren’t. (“Q. Are charter schools getting better results? A. Yes, no and maybe so.”)

But he offered the aldermanic cutback on King’s Academy as “a good example of how the idea is supposed to work.” 

In this era of gridlock where progressive Milwaukee is the obvious target of flailing  state government, there will be constant arguments about the best tactics for dealing with that Madison beast with the big teeth threatening further bites if local officials strike back.

MPS is the ugliest case, a farewell gift to Alberta Darling, presumed to retire in 2016. Despite bizarre acquiescence from County Executive Chris Abele buddying up to a beneficiary of his financial largesse, GOP co-sponsor Dale Kooyenga, this is still a horrible concept in new hair coloring

But it has spurred the search for citizen awareness, new strategies and even surprise attacks to deal with the power hungry who can’t be shamed or reasoned into looking outside their own bubble.

In its indirect assault on a small piece of the puzzle, the Common Council just took a tactical approach so subtle that the JS reporter on the scene didn’t notice. But the public should.

In the interest of transparency, Borsuk who did notice a bit continues as a Sunday columnist for JS but is now actually a senior fellow in law and public policy in a different division of the same university (Marquette) that employs Fuller as professor. It is also the campus where I have taught, organized events and am listed as alum. 

About the author: Noth has been  a professional journalist since the 1960s, first as national, international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then as an editor for its original Green Sheet, also  for almost two decades the paper’s film and drama critic. He also created its Friday Weekend section and ran Sunday TV Screen magazine and Lively Arts as he became the newspaper’s senior feature editor. He was tapped by the publishers of the combining Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for special projects and as first online news producer before voluntarily departing in the mid-1990s to run online news seminars and write on public affairs and Internet and consumer news. From 2002 to 2013 he ran the Milwaukee Labor Press as editor. It served as the Midwest’s largest home-delivered labor newspaper, with archives at milwaukeelabor.org.  In that role he won top awards yearly until the paper stopped publishing in 2013. His investigative pieces and extensive commentaries are now published by several news outlets as well as his culture and politics outlets known as Dom's Domain.  He also reviews theater for urbanmilwaukee.com.

HOW MY MAY 6 STORY DISAPPEARED AND NOW REQUIRES THIS PREAMBLE

By Dominique Paul Noth

On May 6, before the state Democratic Party set up a May 15 deadline for people to become official party members able to vote June 5-6 at the Wisconsin convention to choose new leadership to replace Mike Tate, I detected a strange eruption on social media. It was worth writing about.

This was long before the attitude started twisting into ugly fabrications on top of what I saw as superiority harrumphing. It became so brutal that other media such as Urban Milwaukee took notice – and now I hear the JS in the form of columnist Dan Bice is poking around.

Some people were clearly bothered that I, a progressive in values, was criticizing the people who choose the next state Democratic Party leaders. I hope somewhere in the thousand or so who make the decision were not any so upset that my column, though picked up by wispolitics.com and quoted to its own purpose by congnidissidence in early May,  mysteriously vanished from search engines. I didn’t discover this until I returned this weekend from two weeks visiting family out East.

I have sought to restore the article under the original headline “Why Are Democrats Engaging in Purity Tests?” and am adding this piece as what ought to be preamble to anyone rediscovering my original, which I think readers without an ax to grind will see as commentary on the times not choice among the candidates.

Now the dispute has broadened and elevated into extremist ugly attacks. The media, which adore conflicts that sell papers, are now playing up the Internet dispute and even dragging in familiar political demons – in the form of the Koch brothers as a way to criticize Jason Rae and the questionable past of Chuck Chvala as a way of attacking Martha Laning whom he is rumored to support. 


Casual readers may think that  Laning in behind the Koch attack on Rae though she told me in an interview May 22 she is as mystified and outraged as he is and can’t imagine why Chvala’s apparent support of her has  led to a guy she doesn’t even know being blamed for some sort of dirty tricks campaign against Rae. 

The whole thing is actually quite laughable. It’s cocktail party sniping turned into the sort of Internet exaggeration that the Democrats whomever they choose will have to rise above to operate in future unity. All this seems much more about opinionated attitudes among progressive extremists and some proud Democrats offended by the sense of a friend being attacked, certainly not my intention if you read what I said and certainly not openly plotted by any of the candidates. 

It reveals how sensitive are people who have devoted time and fortune to those off-year campaigns and judicial candidates that the larger public is only now grasping the importance of.  But their slower awakening shouldn’t bar them from offering fresh help and ideas. Frankly the party regulars should be concerned about becoming hidebound. It is one of the paradoxes of our state that the GOP has survived so regularly though most of the state finds their values short-sighted.

Now the worries I expressed about social media loose lips have escalated. The media, determined to sell newspapers, sees a story in all this as a way to laugh about the failures of the Democrats and the party’s immaturity -- particularly since the immature Republicans are much better at maintaining a sense of goose-step control.  I have never quite understood why the goose-step is preferred in a democracy, but apparently the media thinks it is less laughable.

My column didn’t endorse anyone (I’m not even a voting member), but it raised what I still regard as serious questions about insider  politics and the need for Democrats to emphasize their difference from the GOP camp regardless of what they think it takes behind the scenes to raise money and  elect candidates.

I noted how even in nonpresidential elections half the voters support Democratic candidates while actual party membership is negligible, which means a very small group of insiders pick the various candidates.   I pointed out that many people support the principles, fear the party regulars are stuck in a rut and think of Democrats as the welcoming large-tent party.  This internal dispute comes at time when previously unreachable citizens are growingly disturbed at the GOP state machine.

So the column was just a warning, based on what I still regard as trivialities about how new candidates for leadership were being attacked and veterans were using their history of dedication and friendships to suggest they knew more and knew better.  I clearly upset people who have dedicated decades to political campaigning for Democrats they like, simply by warning that the Democrats should not look petty about degrees of progressivism or moderation and should discuss issues and pick candidates not beholden to party machinations but to what works best district by district. 

But apparently passions run high in Milwaukee and extremism thrives on both sides. Just ask editor Bruce Murphy of Urban Milwaukee, where I don’t do politics but theater reviews. I don’t always agree politically with Bruce but he pointed out a provocative but interesting blogger Aaron Camp who claimed that Nation Consulting, the public relations firm run by Thad Nation and for whom Rae has worked,  has the reputation of a major Democratic presence but some clients supported by groups that Democrats deeply dislike. 

Murphy also rightly labeled as “shadowy” Kingfishmke.com which picked up the Camp claim using the demonization of Thad Nation as a way to attack Rae. I have been tracking this suspicious faux news site since  the David Clarke election for a host of misguided stories aimed at “the growing uninformed, under-informed, and quite often misinformed” African American culture (their come-on, not mine), though the site is registered in Arizona and smelled suspicious from the start. But I thought it bad form to give another weird site with a rather insulting Amos ‘n Andy name any ink. 

To associate Rae with the Kochs was flat ludicrous to anyone who knows his politics, even more ludicrous than his supporters attempting to criticize Laning because she once worked in Target’s financial division.

And the Thad Nation attacks? I was somewhat surprised that a good journalist like Murphy and a would-be investigative blogger like Camp neglected to point out that public relations firms run by Evan Zeppos and Martin Schreiber have many Democratic friendly  clients but also clients like Nation Consulting that  some Democrats are not crazy about --  yet  no one accuses Zeppos (who worked for Dave Obey and other leading Democrats) or Schreiber (who was a Democratic governor)  of being Koch slaves or extending the guilt by association to anyone who works for some of their clientele. And these other PR firms have also worked for clients like ATT who want to control Internet lanes and yet are involved in supportive union employment or activities. 

It’s a complicated world in which Democrats have to work extra hard to explain they are pro-business that plays fair and compassionate with workers (which should be the ideal), while the GOP attempts to paint them as anti-business because they question the rapacity that drives too many corporations. It’s a world where the overly righteous on all sides can look like fools. 

Amusing, too, how when Murphy wrote about this and suggested some skepticism about Camp’s claims, he was immediately attacked for making fun of the disabled because Camp has Asperger’s syndrome, a criticism I suspect even Camp found stupid as must others who work through autism and prove  what some regard as a deficit can emerge as a gift. 

Incidentally, I know my May 6 column suddenly vanished since I sought it on several computers, but I can’t be sure if it was hacking. Never had happened before and my host, blogger.com, has failed to provide a clear explanation.

But I know it was there May 6 since so many sites picked it up and all have reported back how the link later vanished. (I have restored.) And I did field complaints from many Democrats who had a horse in this race (I don’t) and thought I was attacking their candidate, though I wasn’t.  I did want balance in the treatment of Laning and I wanted Rae to curb his own publicity methods and the behavior of some of his supporters. Now I feel he is the more injured party, but it could soon be Laning if she is blamed for someone else’s overreach. 

About the author: Noth has been  a professional journalist since the 1960s, first as national, international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then as an editor for its famous entertainment Green Sheet, also  for almost two decades the paper’s film and drama critic. He also created its Friday Weekend section and ran Sunday TV Screen magazine and Lively Arts as he became the newspaper’s senior feature editor. He was tapped by the publishers of the combining Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for special projects and as first online news producer before voluntarily departing in the mid-1990s to run online news seminars and write on public affairs and Internet and consumer news. From 2002 to 2013 he ran the Milwaukee Labor Press as editor. It served as the Midwest’s largest home-delivered labor newspaper, with archives at milwaukeelabor.org.  In that role he won top awards yearly until the paper stopped publishing in 2013. His investigative pieces and extensive commentaries are now published by several news outlets as well as his culture and politics outlets known as Dom's Domain.  He also reviews theater for urbanmilwaukee.com.