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.

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?

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.

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.

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?

It’s also a not-so-modest 50% jump, which the paper forgot to mention in this instance, but would have been sure to point out had it been imposed by some other business or — golly! — by local government as a property tax increase.

I really, really want the paper to stay in business and stay locally owned, as weak as it is at times. If you don’t like the JS, you would probably like not having it even less. The paper, though, now is charging proportionately a lot more for a lot less content and letting its readers know this in a note that just reeks of “you are idiots anyway” attitude.

JS — Please. Stop it.

First, take the JS’ unfortunate decision to deliver the Sunday TV Cue only to those who specifically request it. This seemed like a doomed enterprise from the start, seeing as it is coming from a company that regularly screws up simple vacation holds and can’t get subscriptions right if they contain slight deviations from the norm (or, too often, even if they do not).

TV Cue delivery is most important, most likely, to those who do not have cable or satellite TV and their attendant electronic channel guides. Unfortunately, poor planning struck at the heart of the JS plan even before the requested Cue plan had a chance. The JS, asking people to call if they wanted to continue getting something at no additional charge, just didn’t plan on so many people wanting to continue to get something at no additional charge. On Monday, we were treated to this:

To our newspaper readers

We regret any difficulties you may have had reaching the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s Circulation Customer Service representatives since Sunday. Because of a record high volume of calls, we’ve been unable to speak personally with each caller about his or her delivery concerns. We’ve also been confirming delivery of the Sunday TV Cue section for our subscribers who opted in to continue receiving it. Please bear with us; we will contact each caller and resolve your issues as promptly as possible. Thanks for your understanding.

Sincerely,
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Circulation Team

That is one free TV  woe. The second comes from the federal government and involves the digital converter box coupons that for which we all are supposed to qualify (that switchover date of Feb. 17 is getting ever closer). Harrrrumph! Yeah, right. The coupons are good for 90 days. Ours expired before the we got them. In fact, I’m still waiting. Many, many other people found that they could not buy a converter box before their coupons expired because stores were slow to stock them.

So, Cueless and boxless, what’s a person to do? Reading is great, but on occasion a person needs the typical TV conscious coma fare of the totally mindless and totally stupid. How to find it and how to get it is not something we should have to think about — kind of ruins the effect of the content.

Thank you, George.

I don’t think McIlheran is particularly ethically challenged, journalistically speaking, although his political views are wacko, but his sharing of the contents of a column in advance of it being posted or published just screamed of potential pitfalls that any credible newspaper should avoid.

Do I think McIlheran should have been more aware of that potential and not done what he did?

Yup.

Should he have his butt kicked up between his ears if he ever does something like this again?

Yup.

Should we all read each McIlheran musing the JS publishes?

No. Fricking. Way.

“First, the ethics agreement refers to articles, not columns,” she writes.

So it’s OK for Patrick McIlheran to disclose the contents of his column well in advance of publication to his conservative buddies, plus Jay Bullock?

So then columnist Dan Bice can ship his stuff around town ahead of publication? Columnist Jim Stingl can do that? Columnist Tim Cuprisin? Really? That’s news to me. If I, a subscriber, request that McIlheran and the rest of JS columnists provide to me their columns in advance of publication, can I do that in the name of equal treatment? Or are they allowed to pick and choose who gets an advance look? Is Paddy Mac giving non-subscribers preferential treatment (or punishment, depending on how you view his writings) over people who plunk down cash for their papers?

And is a column really not an article? Generally, but not always, a column is not a story — but to argue that a column is not an article doesn’t match the definitions of “article” that popped when I Googled. And are average readers are supposed to be able to slice that finely the semantic pie Sonya has laid before them?

Sonya suggests that Paddy Mac may have sent his column out after the 7 p.m. day-before posting at JS online, but he actually sent it out several hours before that.

Sonya also writes that the Newspaper Guild doesn’t officially recognize the ethics policy, something else the average reader would have no clue about. By the way, is the right wing Paddy Mac a Guild member?

The explanations are not good enough. If the JS exempts certain staffers from its ethics policy, it needs to clearly say so so readers can understand — with no hidden caveats — what they are getting.

“It is a permitted practice for Journal Sentinel editorial board members and columnists to disclose the contents of their work in advance of publication to a select few most likely to support their points of view.”

Something like that. But is that really something the JS wants to live with?

Maybe. But it makes me queasy. A few people — mostly of the conservative persuasion (except for that folkbum guy) — get to read the columns in advance and, perhaps, start drafting supporting blog posts or letters even before the column is published in the paper. All seems kind of like a fixed fight, doesn’t it?

And if it is OK for McIlheran to show his columns to the select few in advance, is it OK for him to share editorials before they are published? How about news stories?

The changing ways columnists and bloggers communicate may mean that maybe hard and fast journalistic rules — like you don’t spread newpaper content around in advance of publication — are changing. To allow columnists to sneak-peak their writings to a handful of friends seems a slippery slope the JS ought not want to start down. It damages the paper’s credibility and chips away at the trust it must have from its readers. We are left wondering: Who else at the JS is showing what else to a politically friendly audience?