I couldn’t bring myself to watch the Oscars last night. I just assume Taylor Swift won all the big awards. So, let’s see what else happened last week.
Wrong message. The Madison Parks Commission has made a terrible mistake. They’ve allowed a mural to go up in an East Side park lionizing Tony Robinson. Nine years ago, only a couple blocks from that park, Robinson, who had a criminal record, was high on a mixture of hallucinogens and other drugs when he attacked a Madison police officer in a dark stairwell. He was responsible for his own ensuing death. He is no hero and no example for young people. The mural was created by an artist and it appeared on State Street for a while and that’s fine. It’s a free country. But it’s very much another thing for the City of Madison to sanction it on city property. The mural went up last week and it will come down a very long year from now. The whole project is offensive and wrong-headed.
Still don’t get it. Vice President Kamala Harris visited Madison last week and tried to connect with blue collar workers by touring a new facility being built to house the city’s electric busses. She hammered away at support for unions when over 90% of Wisconsin workers don’t belong to one and while those who do are mostly teachers and other public sector workers. Democrats are losing the blue collar vote because they don’t connect with them on basic values (see paragraph above). Support for unions, which help fund Democrats’ campaigns, will have no impact whatsoever on how blue collar voters cast their ballots. Biden will show up in Milwaukee on Wednesday to repeat the same tone deaf message.
The State of Joe. The president’s State of the Union address wasn’t tone deaf at all. It seemed aimed at one audience: people like me, the 61% of people who voted for Biden in 2020 and now think he’s too old for another four years. So, how’d he do? As well as could be expected I suppose, but he’s got to keep this up for another eight months. He didn’t make me any less uneasy about that. Also, Wisconsin Rep. Derrick Van Orden reminded us all why he deserves to be a one-termer. He shouted “Lies!” at Biden regarding his characterization of Trump’s handling of COVID. This from a guy who repeats Trump’s lies about the election — real lies. Let’s hope come November Van Orden is gone. No lie.
This’ll cheer you up. Biden may be old, but he’s a man of good judgement. What if it’s Trump who hovers above the nuclear button again? The New York Times has been running a sobering series on nuclear war. What happens when a nuke strikes a city, the exact protocols for the president to issue an order to strike, that kind of happy stuff. They recommend that a law be passed to require that the president get agreement from at least two officials — like the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Secretary of Defense — before he issues a first strike order. With the prospects of another Trump presidency very possible this is something that needs to happen soon.
Haley’s comet fades. While not someone I would have voted for myself, Nikki Haley would have been someone else I would have trusted with the power to blow up the world. Give her credit for hanging in there until her quixotic crusade to keep Donald Trump from her party’s nomination finally ran out of gas. And give her double credit for not endorsing Trump on her way out. Because she may want a future in the Republican Party she probably won’t do this, but I think she’d make a fine No Labels candidate. No matter what she does, if Trump can’t win over the lion’s share of her voters, he’ll lose.
Another crack in the “student-athlete” wall. Finally, from the world of sports (and business), Dartmouth athletes won a big case last week before the National Labor Relations Board. The NLRB ruled that basketball players there can move ahead with their petition to form a union. (And no, having a couple dozen Ivy League athletes form a union won’t create more Democratic voters.) All the players want is to be paid $20 an hour and get health insurance, same as cafeteria workers on campus. But if they ultimately prevail — and it’s still a long road — this would have enormous implications for the real basketball and football powerhouse schools which make millions and pay their athletes nothing.
Yellow Stripes & Dead Armadillos 
I mostly agree with your opinion on Tony Robinson but I don’t agree that he was responsible for his own death. A Madison cop who had killed a different perp a few years before shot Robinson, who was not armed, many times when he should have waited for backup. The city settled the Robinson family lawsuit for several million dollars because it would have lost. It’s true that Tony Robinson was no hero and the mural is not necessary but he belonged in jail, not the morgue.
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It’s more accurate to say that the city’s insurance company settled. It was their decision. Both the city and the officer objected to the settlement. And, of course, the cop didn’t know that Robinson was unarmed and he believed that he may have been attacking someone else when he pursued him, which is why he didn’t wait for backup. The investigations found that he acted within his training.
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A screwed up situation no matter how you look at it, and agreement, Robinson shouldn’t be lionized and Kamala and the Dems are tone-deaf.
When did the SOTU become a stump speech? ‘Roid Rage Joe looked like he was going to blow a gasket. His speech ‘was like a punch in the face to the Republicans’?
The SOTU? rage all ’round.
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