Tag Archives: Journal Sentinel

Michael Lock: no genius here

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JS reporter John Diedrich’s series on super bad guy Michael Lock are absolutely riveting reads.

But, a few small quibbles. Anyone who buries a couple of bodies in his own back yard is not — absolutely, positively NOT — a criminal mastermind.

And any law enforcement personnel who meets with a violent drug dealer like Louis Jackson (hot grease on your crotch, anyone? Jackson can administer) in a place like Hawthorn Glen, a Milwaukee Public Schools recreation site frequented by children and families, ought to have their heads examined and their badges taken away for a while.

Yet, that is where cops met with Mr. Jackson, their chief informant in the Lock case. Really, really unbelievable.

Suburban districts not really changing

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The JS had had a half story in the paper yesterday about suburban school districts’ diversity. A major point of the story was that suburban districts now are educating minorities who don’t have to be bused to the suburbs, but who actually live there.

The story, though, relied on cherry-picked statistics and an unrepresentative sampling of area school districts to make the point. It’s a half story because so very much was left out.

Enrollment data shows that of the non-white students in Wauwatosa schools, 65% live within the district’s attendance boundaries,” the story reports.

So 65% of what? What is the base number? The story doesn’t say. Isn’t it rather important to know whether there are a total of 10 minorities or 1,000?

The State Department of Public Instruction says the Wauwatosa district is about 26% minority this year, which means the resident minority student population is about 17%. Whoopee.

The county’s overall minority population is about 31% and its black population is 25%. The city of Wauwatosa’s overall minority population is 6% and its black population is about 2%, according to the US Census Bureau. That’s progress for you!

Given all that, what conclusions can be drawn from the story? Only that there was some less than sterling reporting and editing going on.

In Greenfield, according to the story:

…the number of minoirity students living in the district’s attendance zone grew faster than that of minoirty Greenfield students living outside the district.

Well, heavens. Isn’t that just as meaningless as can be. It’s total mud. Are we talking actual numbers or percentages? If it’s the latter, a very small increase in the number of resident minority students would likely mean a huge increase in the growth rate because the base is so small. (Going from one to two is a 100% increase, but going from 100 to 101 is just a 1% increase). The Greenfield district over the last three years has seen a small decline in its overall black enrollment and increases in its Hispanic, Native American and Asian enrollments, according to DPI. The DPI data does not differentiate between resident and non-resident minorities. The city of Greenfield is 94% white with a 1% black population. It has a Latino population of about 4%, an Asian population of about 2%, and a Native American population of less than 1%. That does not bode well for residential minority enrollments in the public school system.

Meanwhile, what districts did the paper omit? What about Well, there’s Oconomowoc, which is 94% white (growing slightly more diverse over three years), and Lake Country, which is 95% white (growing a bit more white over the last three years) and Richfield, also 95% white (no change over the last three years).

The overall question seems to be: why does this story even exist?

Why is this the top story?

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Two — count ‘em, two (that’s less than half the fingers on one hand) — researchers at UWM say global warming may take a little longer than a zillion other scientists think.

The global-warming nay-sayers glom onto and distribute a distorted, incorrect version of their research and use itto argue that the global warming issue isn’t settled.

The JS runs this on top of the front page, with a headline and lede that does not mention the part of the story that is about the misuse of the research and how it spread.

So why is this story even the lead story in the paper anyway? On a scale of 1 to 10, its newsworthiness seems about 0.

Some outstanding journalism

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The JS did the entire region a huge favor with paper’s two-part series on abuses in the child care system. Top-flight journalism was done here, offering an example of why a local newspaper is so vital to a community. Let’s see a blogger match that effort.

People who actually care about early childhood education have been watching this fiasco play out for years, recognizing that the system was designed to be defrauded, not to offer quality care.

It is too bad that so many records were withheld from the paper. It does not speak well of the system or the the state’s and local governments’ management of the system. What don’t they want the public to know? If those records contain personal information, can’t it be redacted and the records released?

If we don’t know what’s wrong, we can’t fix it. But then, maybe that’s the point.

Has Walker totally lost his mind??

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County Executive Scott Walker is not going to take any stimulus money because tax cuts are the only stimulus he likes, according to the JS.

Wow. That’s dumb. County facilities and even the county workforce are in shambles because of Walker’s policies.  Walker has been a joke of an administrator; now he is proving himself to be a buffoon. Thank goodness the major workforce training entity was moved from the county to the city because surely Walker would rather see an even more obscenely astronomical unemployment rate in the central city than accept stimulus money.

There are a lot of questions about what the stimulus package will contain and whether it will do any good. Here’s hoping that congress critters actually know what they are voting on this time around before they approve it. But to simply reject, in advance, any funding from the package is just plain crazy stupid.

Questions:

Can the County Board override Walker’s bone-headed stance?

If he runs for governor and due to some obscene twist of fate actually is elected, will Walker refuse stimulus money for the entire state?

Will he reject any stimulus money that flows through the state to the county?

Walker says he won’t rule out stimulus money for local infrastructure projects (a rather large exception to his general stance). So stimulus money used to fund WisDOT’s freeway expansion concrete-a-thon might be OK, but stimulus money meant to pay for transit operating costs somehow would not be OK.  Isn’t much of transit funding on the local property tax? So Walker would rather maintain a higher property tax burden for county residents than take stimulus money? Is he nuts?

Will he refuse to contract with private agencies that receive stimulus money either directly or through other levels of government?

Shouldn’t Walker, to be ideologically consistent, reject all state and federal funding, since all that funding requires some sort of taxes to be levied (and increased) and all that funding has the indirect effect of stimulating the economy and creating jobs?

Hasn’t he spent a lot of time complaining that the state does not give the county enough money?

Who the heck is advising him on this stuff?