How does it feel to be called a racist?
That is the very first question host Stu Levitan posed to the Squire of the Stately Manor in the taping of Access City Hall on the Madison City cable channel. Perhaps he was doing his best imitation of Mike Wallace's old interview show in the 1950s minus the Parliament cigarette.
Put the guest on the defensive from the get-go. Except Blaska plays offense. I soon had old Stu in a rhetorical hammerlock from which he could not escape.
I responded that playing the R card means your blogger has won the argument. Crying race is -- pace Samuel Johnson -- the last refuge of a liberal.
My entire public career has been about providing equal opportunity for all but, at the same time, equal responsibility. I do not buy into the argument that we must have two separate and unequal standards of conduct.
I have objected to the Community Development Authority's loading down of our neighborhoods with more Section 8 welfare housing than the community can safely accommodate. Stu is a CDA commissioner. Very few hereabouts care about skin color; they do worry about gunfire, car jackings, and burglaries. In other words: bad behavior.
As Glenn Beck said at the Lincoln Memorial, Lately, in the last twenty years, we've been told that character doesn't matter. Well, if character doesn't matter, then what was Martin Luther King asking people to judge people by?
Once more, to Charles Krauthammer's The last refuge of a liberal:
It is a measure of the corruption of liberal thought and the collapse of its self-confidence that, finding itself so widely repudiated, it resorts reflexively to the cheapest race-baiting (in a colorful variety of forms). ...
The Democrats are going to get beaten badly in November. Not just because the economy is ailing. And not just because Obama over-read his mandate in governing too far left. But because a comeuppance is due the arrogant elites whose undisguised contempt for the great unwashed prevents them from conceding a modicum of serious thought to those who dare oppose them.
Turn on, tune in
I shared the spotlight on Stu's show with Madame Brenda whom, I thought, was given softball questions. Stu, the Madame, and the Squire: three former elected officials and current scribblers.
Stu -- the most powerful man in Madison city government (what does he have on Mayor Dave?) -- did a professional job. The show ran smoothly. Hosting a TV or radio show is more difficult than it appears.
Blaska is accustomed to tough questions in a liberal town. He gives tough answers.
So if Stu wasn't going to put the wood to Madame Brenda it remained for your irascible host to do so. Watch the master at work Fridays at 7 p.m., Saturdays at 5:30 p.m. and Sundays at 10 a.m. throughout the month of September on the following channels: Charter analog 98, Charter digital 994, AT&T U-Verse 99. The webcast should be up some time Friday.
Speaking of star turns: Hey kids! Catch my act this Friday from 4 to 6 p.m. -- a day that will live ... in INFAMY! -- on Up Front with Brian Schimming on WIBA 1310 AM.
Madame Brenda's work is bearing fruit
Steve Prestegard at Marketplace tells us that the Wisconsin's business climate has fallen to 46th in the national Pollina Corporate Real Estate state business climate comparison. Pollina's 2010 comparison ranks Wisconsin ahead of only Massachusetts, West Virginia, Rhode Island and California. Prestegard says Pollina's annual comparison is important because Pollina does business site selection, a field in which Pollina's clients can choose from not just across the U.S., but around the world.
Pollina's report "details how many state governments have the resources, but not the will, to keep Americans employed in high paying 21st Century jobs.
Contrary to popular belief, companies do not move offshore solely because of lower labor costs. Our federal government and most state governments have created a business environment that has become hostile to business, while other countries have created business environments that are considerably more business friendly. Many states have also created hostile environments for business through the use of overzealous taxation and regulation.
Feingold doesn't get it?
At the start of the year, few observers thought the Senate was up for grabs in part because it seemed implausible that Washington's Patty Murray, California's Barbara Boxer and Wisconsin's Russ Feingold were in any serious danger. ... Senior Democrats, however, are increasingly worried about the trio and especially Murray and Feingold.
"He doesn't yet seem to get the environment he's operating in this time," fretted a top Democratic official of Feingold.
Then why is he going negative?
Today's chuckle: 'and, of course, the squirrels'
James Lee, the Al Gore disciple who held hostages at Discovery Channel headquarters to drive home his eco-terrorist message that the froggies must be saved at the expense of humankind, has been awarded the Nobel Prize, posthumously. Lee is the fellow who demanded that the Discovery Channel stop encouraging the birth of any more parasitic human infants" in order to save "the froggies and, of course, the squirrels."
Saving the environment and the remaining species diversity of the planet is now your mindset. Nothing is more important than saving them. The Lions, Tigers, Giraffes, Elephants, Froggies, Turtles, Apes, Raccoons, Beetles, Ants, Sharks, Bears, and, of course, the Squirrels.
Lee said he felt an "awakening" after watching former Vice President Al Gore's documentary "An Inconvenient Truth," and decided he had been doing too little to protect the environment, according to CNN. Yeah, Al Gore has driven more than a few people environmentally insane.
Thanks to Moonbattery for the illustration.
