It’s official: Condoleezza Rice is whiter than me.

You may have heard that I was on a TV show (primarily because I won’t shut up about it) last week. One of my fellow panelists, Mikel Holt, also writes a column for the Milwaukee Community Journal, a paper targeted for Milwaukee’s black community.

Last week, he wrote a wildly entertaining column that attempted to describe African American males’ (or “the brothas,” as Holt calls them) true feelings about black women. Holt interviewed pastors, barbers, and guys in clubs to come up with his observations – and they’re all worth a read.

Examples:

• “The truth of the matter is, if you dress like a whore or hoochie mama, we assume you’re telling us only one thing: I’m available for a good time, but not for a long-term relationship.” (Ed. Note – I much prefer hoochie mamas to whores.)

• “(We) ain’t your baby’s daddy, or the last brother you dated!!! Don’t generalize about us, and definitely don’t compare us to the thug or sperm donor who broke your heart, or disappeared as soon as you announced your pregnancy. Why were you laying with a thug to begin with? Show some respect for yourself; you’re more than a sexual object; you’re more than a body.”

• “Sisters say they want a strong man, but engage in an ongoing war over who heads the household. I’m a pacifist. Why go through a life long war?”

• “What’s the difference between a White woman and Black one? You can have an argument with a White woman and it ends at the front door. It may resume after work, but she will still kiss you and say have a nice day. A sister will follow you to work, push your boss out the way and cuss you out on your job. And then cuss you out again after you get fired.”

Read the rest here.

I know I’m supposed to be all “Mr. Supply and Demand,” and therefore impervious to gas price fluctuations, but I have finally reached my tipping point. Apparently, the road I use to get home from work has turned into the Tour de France with everyone now riding their bike. I had to drive 20 miles an hour the whole way while the Spandex Mafia hogged the road. This is simply unacceptable.

Generally, I live by the following rule: if you live close enough to your office that you can ride your bike to it, you’re saving like three bucks a week by not driving. I will pay you three dollars (no matter what the street value) to stay out of the middle of the road on your bike, chatting it up with some woman who you’re trying to fool into thinking you’re an avid rider. If you refuse my offer, I will continue to furiously shake my fist at you from the comfort of my Ford Escape.

In the mean time, I will try to think of what a “Mr. Supply and Demand” mascot would actually look like.

Today, the University of Wisconsin-Madison announced the appointment of their new chancellor, Carolyn “Biddy” Martin. Martin is no stranger to UW-Madison, having completed her Ph.D. in German Literature there in 1985. At Cornell University, she moved up to the position of Provost, serving on several committees for the Institute of German Cultural Studies, Women’s Studies and Lesbian, Bisexual, and Gay Studies. According to her online biography at Cornell, her publications include Woman and Modernity: The (Life) Styles of Lou Andreas-Salome (1991) and Femininity Played Straight (1996).

(The fact that Martin is openly gay isn’t in any way notable, other than the fact that it contradicts the UW’s recent talking point that all their bright gay talent is fleeing the university because of their lack of domestic partner benefits. That’s assuming, of course, that the paper just didn’t mean she has a sunny disposition.)

Rather than predict what Martin’s chancellorship will look like, it is instructive to look back at the tenure of the outgoing chancellor, John Wiley. During the Wiley years, the UW-Madison became a punching bag for the Wisconsin Legislature. When conservatives looked at the state’s flagship university, they saw scandal, fraud, and fiscal mismanagement. And they didn’t get much disagreement from liberals. Yet when one digs deeper into the Wiley legacy, there were plenty of things for right-wingers to like. And with the installation of the new chancellor, conservatives may gain a new appreciation for how good they have had it for the last seven years.

For one, Wiley was a staunch defender of free speech on campus. In 2005, a furor erupted in the UW System when the UW-Stout moved to kick the ROTC off their campus. Liberals at Stout argued the armed forces had no place on their campus, due in large part to the military’s policy on gays and lesbians. In Madison, Wiley stood up to the anti-war faction and defended the ROTC’s right to do business on campus. Wiley took the stage at several contentious student-led meetings where he refused to back down. In fact, some anti-war campus groups ended up accusing Wiley of working in cooperation with the U.S. Defense Department to spy on their activities.

In some cases, Wiley actively supported conservatives and Republicans on campus. In 2007, the UW-Madison College Republicans hosted a speech by conservative commentator David Horowitz on campus. Rather than requiring the College Republicans to pay the extra $1,300 security fee, Wiley paid for it with student fees, while anti-war groups virulently protested his decision. Recently, Wiley discontinued off-campus student funding for left-wing groups like Sex Out Loud and the Wisconsin Public Interest Research Group (WISPIRG), citing their lack of relevance to actual student issues.

Wiley also refused to sign the “Presidents Climate Commitment,” which commits university presidents to reducing greenhouse gases on campus. “I believe it is ill-advised to sign a pledge in which the goals are poorly defined and where the cost to taxpayers is unknown,” he said.

Every legislative session, there’s an effort to allow UW faculty and academic staff to unionize. In each of these attempts, Wiley has listened to his own faculty and refused to support an effort to allow collective bargaining by faculty. New chancellor finalists Tim Mulcahy and Rebecca Blank both stated publicly that they opposed such faculty unionization, and neither of them got the job. (Mulcahy pulled his name out of the running, most likely after he found out he didn’t get the job. In related news, I am pulling my name out of the running to replace Ned Yost as manager of the Brewers.)

Perhaps most impressively, Wiley raised billions of dollars in private money to expand the UW-Madison through its endowment fund. If someone promised the Legislature that they could raise a billion dollars in non-taxpayer money to improve the performance of any other state department, Republicans would jump at the chance. Yet Wiley’s accomplishments in private fundraising are often overlooked in favor of more negative stories about the UW.

Despite Wiley’s conservative achievements, there was also plenty of fodder for those looking for more accountability from the UW-Madison. In one incident, a vice chancellor for student affairs allegedly had an inappropriate relationship with a graduate student, then was allowed to stay on the payroll at a salary of $73,000 per year while under suspension. The UW system was criticized for giving its administrators “backup jobs” in the event they had to leave their current position. It came to light that the UW gave their chancellors a $700 per month automobile stipend, and an audit of the system showed that nearly 25 percent of the positions within the UW were administrative in nature. Several high-dollar computer projects went belly-up. In all, it was not a good run for the UW.

Yet in many of these cases, the troublesome problems were the results of system-wide policies, not necessarily of the UW-Madison. And in some respects, these are problems one expects to find in any business with a $4 billion budget and over 70,000 employees. But because the UW reports to taxpayers, these problems within the system tend to be highly publicized and quite embarrassing to the UW bureaucracy (often times, for good reason.) Additionally, there’s no escaping the fact that the UW-Madison is a hegemonic liberal institution. Asking the UW to be “more conservative” is like asking a baboon to play the harmonica.

This doesn’t excuse many of the UW’s gaffes. And there certainly will be more to come – at no time in our state’s history has the UW missed an opportunity to be an irritant to the Legislature. But it would be a shame to judge Wiley’s tenure by these bureaucratic screw-ups alone. There were many instances where Wiley reached across the aisle and did the right thing to achieve an ideological balance. And letting him slip off into retirement without acknowledging these positive actions would be unfairly maligning his legacy.

As for Chancellor-to-be Martin, it is impossible to tell what her administration will look like in the future. Perhaps the Cornell Women’s Studies Department is churning out some of our great modern female conservative minds. More likely, her personally ideological views may have nothing to do with how she serves as an administrator. But if she makes the same effort as John Wiley to stand up for viewpoint diversity on campus, she’d be off to a good start. And if she can even approach the amount of private sector money Wiley raised, even better.

Earlier in May, I took a trip to Seattle for a health care conference sponsored by the Washington Policy Center.  I gave a speech to the conference on the proposed Healthy Wisconsin Plan, and the WPC has now put the video online.

You can view it here.  (Warning – the file size is pretty big – 113 MB)

In case you were under the impression that Congress isn’t hard at work, a new U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) report demonstrates otherwise. According to the new GAO study conducted at the request of Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK), condom manufacturers have been inadequately labeling their products, giving people a false sense of security when it comes to sexually transmitted diseases. You know, for all those people that read the condom boxes when they’re conspicuously buried under a pile of gum, soda, and shoe polish up at the cash register.

So sayeth your federal government:

FDA reviewed studies on the relationship between use of male latex condoms and STDs and determined that existing condom labeling did not provide complete information about the effectiveness of condoms in preventing the transmission of certain STDs.

[...]

Among other things, FDA noted that condoms provide less protection against HPV, which can have multiple routes of transmission, than against certain other STDs. However, FDA found that condoms, when used correctly and consistently, can be effective in reducing the risk of transmission. Based on its review, FDA found limitations in existing condom labeling and identified several areas in which improved labeling would help provide reasonable assurance of condoms’ safety and effectiveness.

What the report fails to point out, however, is that condoms can lead to a greatly increased likelihood of your friends hi-fiving you. Seriously – who out there believes that sexual contact of any kind, condoms or not, doesn’t contain some risk of STD transmittal? If there are people that believe that, they are likely to be the same people that don’t use condoms because they might get an STD by using one.

I can save the federal government the millions of dollars it likely cost to conduct this nine month study. Here’s my suggested alternative warning label:

“WARNING: MAY LEAD TO TEMPORARY AWESOMENESS, FOLLOWED BY DEEP, LASTING REGRET AND UNWANTED PHONE CALLS”

Here’s the video of my appearance this week on Sunday Insight with Charlie Sykes. Against my better judgment, I watched some of it. It appears the staff at WTMJ removed the footage of me and replaced it with film of a sumo wrestler with too much hair gel. I am never eating anything ever again. I am probably going to have to file zoning papers with the City of Madison to classify my chin as a structural addition.

Here’s my summary of what filming it was like.

Admit it – at some point, you’ve been sitting at home watching some talk show or game show, seen a guest on the show, and said “I can do better than that dope.” Then you start thinking about how everyone would love you if some network only gave you a chance to show how smart and charming you are on the air. Well, I’m here to say – it doesn’t quite work that way.

I got the call on Tuesday that Charlie Sykes wanted me to be a guest on his show that airs Sunday. The show tapes on Friday, so I’d have to drive from Madison to Milwaukee on Friday afternoon.

The second I agreed to it, I started feeling like I was having stomach ulcers. I was thinking this could be a complete disaster. If you ever wondered what TV would look like if they just dragged people off the street and asked them to be political commentators on television, this would be a good example. I started thinking of things I could say about whatever topic might come up (we don’t get the list of topics until Thursday afternoon, in case something late breaking happens.) I pieced together some stuff on Michelle Obama, Senator Roger Breske’s retirement, and other stuff. When I finally got the topic list, I started focusing on oil prices, Paul Ryan, and Michael McGee.

Now, I’ve been doing my little 90-second editorials on Wisconsin Public TV for over a year and a half now, but this was going to be entirely different. I’d have to make a statement, then have a follow-up response ready. I actually researched old shows to get a feel about what certain panelists might say about certain issues.

I got to the studio and met Jeff Fleming, Mykel Holt, and Ken Lamke. All were really nice guys, and welcomed me to the show. Lamke had actually heard of me, which kind of surprised me. We wandered over to the set, which seemed a little bigger than I thought it would be. Charlie took about 20 seconds to explain to me where to look at the camera, and reiterated that this show was as low-pressure as it gets. Of course, that may be true for the show’s regulars – once you have a track record of doing the show, you might be able to get away with making a mistake – but if you’re me, this show was going to be my first impression. And if I screwed up, people would think (or know, as the case may be) that I’m an idiot.

When the cameras started rolling and Charlie started talking, it suddenly turned completely surreal. I mean, here’s a show that I watch every week, with the same panelists I see on TV. And now, I’m sitting in one of the chairs, looking at these guys with the lights on. It’s almost like being in one of those exhibitions at Disney World that provide the “American Idol experience” or something. I was part of the “Sunday Insight” experience.

Right off the bat, Charlie came to me for a question. I immediately realized how hard this was going to be. I was trying hard to remember the quotes I had come up with beforehand. But your mouth starts moving, and you know words are coming out, but you can’t be entirely sure of what you’re saying. Your brain is thinking about everything other than what you’re saying. You catch a glimpse of yourself in the monitor out of the corner of your eye, and you think, mid-sentence, “can I possibly be that fat?” Right in the middle of one of my first points, it dawned on me that all four other guys on stage were staring right at me – and I stumbled over one of my points as a result. As I had predicted before the show, I was sweating like a whore in church.

We got through the oil price question, then the Paul Ryan topic, then moved on to the Michael McGee subject. This is where I bungled the question. In researching the topic beforehand, I couldn’t really think of anything else to say that hasn’t already been said about McGee. And when I’m writing, I think some of the best points I make are when I either look a couple steps ahead, or look back a few steps to figure out how we got here. I tried to do that with this topic, just to make an original point, and I flopped. I think it’s a reasonable question to ask how these inner city corruption cases are going to be handled under an Obama Department of Justice, especially since race tends to be a defense in many cases (as it will be in McGee’s.) But you only have about 15 seconds to make your case, and I stumbled doing so – and so by trying to make an original point, I ended up making one that just didn’t fit the discussion.

We finished up with the Winners and Losers section, and I think I did pretty well. My “losers” pick may have been a little more ribald than they’re used to, but I thought it was a funny topic, and it dealt with government. It spurred a lot of on-set discussion afterwards among the panelists, too.

While I was nervous before the show, I wasn’t nearly ready for the nervousness I would feel in the period between filming the show on Friday and Sunday when it aired. You go back and think about all the things you said and what you could have done better. It’s easy to be hard on yourself, because only you know all the great points that you were prepared to say, but didn’t get a chance to. (For instance, during the oil price discussion, I was wondering how Herb Kohl would feel about eliminating all the laws that keep milk prices artificially high. If we were paying as much per gallon for milk as we are for gas, he’d be the happiest guy alive.) You just have to cross your fingers that the audience actually likes the things you did actually get a chance to say.

I was actually surprised at how little time you actually have to make your points. The show is probably actually only 20 minutes of air time, and when you subtract the opening sequences, Winners and Losers, and Charlie’s questions, there’s probably about 15 minutes of actual discussion among the five panelists. And when you divide that among three topics, you get about a minute per issue to make all your points.

So, lessons learned. If I’m ever asked back, I should do a little better. (Some of my early Public Television appearances were beyond rough, but I got the hang of it.) Fortunately, I was able to alleviate my stomach ulcers with a delicious Kopp’s cheeseburger on the way home.

When the show goes up online, I’ll link to it here. But I’m not sure how long it will be before I’m actually able to watch it.

With Memorial Day approaching, I happened to catch this press release issued on Friday by the Democratic Party of Wisconsin. Its title:

“John McCain Doesn’t Support Wisconsin Troops and Veterans.”

Honest to God – how dare they. Let me repeat – HOW DARE THEY.

When Rachel Strauch-Nelson (the contact person on the release) spends six years being beaten to within an inch of her life by the Vietnamese, then she may be qualified to even use the words “John McCain” in a press release. I understand that Barack Obama himself made this a talking point, but even he should be embarrassed about this ridiculous attack. It’s even more embarrassing when it’s made by a bunch of political hacks barely out of college.

In fact, here’s veterans’ affairs expert Strauch-Nelson herself (right), during her time working against the gay marriage constitutional amendment:

I’ve been in politics a long time, and I’m aware that a lot of these garbage press releases are written by 20-somethings looking to get a cheap press hit. But this is simply beyond the pale. If the Wisconsin Democratic Party wants to attack John McCain for his views on health care, or the environment, or whatever, then they are free to do so. But saying a former P.O.W. “doesn’t care about veterans” is simply indefensible. And it speaks more about the staff at DPW than it does about John McCain.

(Side note: I love it when Democrats accuse McCain of being “weak on the economy.” He’s weak on the economy because he sides with the Democrats too often – such as when he opposed President Bush’s tax cuts. But since he was attacked during the primary for being bad on the economy, liberals have picked up this talking point as their own – without realizing they’re criticizing their own policies.)

Today Weezer released the video for their new song, “Pork and Beans.” You’ll probably recognize a lot of the guest stars from the internet – including “Chocolate Rain” guy.

This weekend in Madison marks the return of Bratfest, hailed as the “world’s largest sausage festival” by the organizers at Sentry. Every year, the festival raises thousands of dollars for charity by selling Johnsonville tube steaks.

This, however, doesn’t please some people. From the “Community Comments” section of the Cap Times this morning:

lib05 says:

I strongly urge people to not participate in brat fest.

Johnsonville brats are served there. I know it is a Wisconsin company, but Johnsonville has membership on WMC board….remember those folks that unapologetically purchased our last two supreme court justice races?

Johnsonville endorsed the campaign tactics that have marred Wisconsin’s reputation and labeled us as having unfair elections…….

Good grief. I suppose that guy is posting those comments using a computer made out of hemp and hugs.

I have been invited to be a panelist on “Sunday Insight With Charlie Sykes” this Sunday morning.
Hopefully, there’s no tradition requiring hazing for the new guy, like making me not wear pants or something. I’m pretty nervous about the whole deal, but I suppose it’s better than not being on TV, right?

I have informed the producers that they may need to set aside three minutes at the end of the show for Charlie to publicly dis-invite me from ever participating in the show again.

Al Qaeda is on the march, but we’re using our heat seeking aircraft to c-block this guy:

Naked pilot, flight attendant arrested in woods

HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — An airline pilot was found hiding behind a shed wearing only flip-flops and a wristwatch as a nighttime romp in the woods with a flight attendant ended with both under arrest, police said.

Jeffrey Paul Bradford, 24, and Adrianna Grace Connor, 24, both employees of Pinnacle Airlines Inc., were at a diner on the outskirts of Harrisburg on Sunday night before they apparently decided to walk into the woods, police said.

“They told the officer they wanted to go do it in the woods, essentially,” said Lower Swatara Township police Sgt. Richard Brandt. “That’s the best answer they had.”

The two somehow became separated, and people who live in the neighborhood summoned police around 9:30 p.m., saying they had seen a naked man and an intoxicated woman.

A helicopter with heat-seeking equipment was called in, and Bradford was discovered hiding behind a shed shortly before midnight.

“Uh, captain – I see two small blue objects in the infared.”

I’m laying down the marker right now – if I’m ever arrested for shooting a gun at my wife’s car, there is a 100% chance that this is how I answer those charges: