Commentary Update for September 2, 2003

  1. This Week's Show
  2. I suppose I could collect my books and get on back to school.
  3. Labor Day Blues
  4. Bulgarian Insights
  5. Simile of the Week
  6. Halliburton Cleaning Up
  7. Look Ma, We Kill Mourning Doves!
  8. The Beer Man
  1. This Week's Show: Our August interview with Circuit Court Judge Robert Haase will be on channel 66 at 7 p.m. this week. I will get a copy of that and the Joe Maehl interview to cable access channel 2 this week and arrange to get the shows played there too. Meanwhile, we in mid-September we may start taping new one-hour programs in the UW Oshkosh Titan-TV studios.
  2. I suppose I could collect my books and get on back to school: A new semester of classes starts here at UW Oshkosh on Wednesday. I will be teaching 2 sections of freshman level course called "Communication in Contemporary Society" and an upper-level seminar in "The Rhetoric of Rock Music" (we start with Muddy Waters and Elmore James and end up with Hip Hop later in the semester).
  3. Labor Day Blues: Things have been tough all over, but the recession has fit Wisconsin especially hard, as noted in this piece by the Madison Capital Times. A corrupt, incompetent legislature and consecutive gutless governors surely hasn't helped matters much. The Center on Wisconsin Strategy's 2003 State of Working Wisconsin Update does a good job of showing where we have been hit hardest. The Wisconsin State Journal gives us this report on the Tyson workers strike, with some of the workers arguing that Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) is the only presidential candidate who walks picket lines as part of his campaign. Nationally, United for a Fair Economy reports that the CEO-worker pay gap was 281-to-1 in 2002, nearly seven times greater than the 1982 ratio of 42-to-1. Populist pundit Jim Hightower looks at all this and gives us a labor "call to arms."
  4. Bulgarian Insights: Dan and Billie Jo Rylance submitted the third installment of their Letters From Bulgaria feature recently.
  5. Simile of the Week: The legendary Jimmy Breslin, commenting on a Howard Dean rally: "He spoke without saying one phrase that would inspire. And the cheers of the crowd seemed forced. The crowd out there was young and as white as the candidate. I walked through them for some time and there was no electricity in the whole place."
  6. Halliburton Cleaning Up: Well, in a manner of speaking at least. No matter how bad things get in Iraq, we can all rest easy knowing that Halliburton, "the company formerly headed by Vice President Cheney, has won contracts worth more than $1.7 billion under Operation Iraqi Freedom and stands to make hundreds of millions more dollars under a no-bid contract awarded by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, according to newly available documents." (Washington Post). Meanwhile the escalating violence in the country has forced aid organizations and even the IMF and World Bank to recall workers. Rummy's henchman Paul Wolfowitz, in his continuing effort to link Iraq to 9/11, now says that in the current situation, "we face that poisonous mixture of former regime loyalists and foreign fighters . . . " Pardon me Wolfy, but didn't the peace movement, not to mention a plethora of retired (and even some active) military officers, and even Bush #41 say that would happen? The neocons sold the war on the basis of a quick military victory followed by throngs of liberated Iraqis welcoming the west with open arms, and now that it appears a good portion of those arms are carrying rocket propelled grenades, a new narrative has been weaved. Former marine and UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter has a much different view of the resistance, a view that suggests it is naive to think that the continuing attacks are the work only of Saddam loyalists and foreign fighters.
  7. Look Ma, We Kill Mourning Doves!: The gentle mourning dove is actually Wisconsin's symbol of peace. Yesterday, after activists trying to save the doves lost their almost two-year court battle, the hunt began. Not surprisingly, Jim The New Democrat Doyle refused to intervene. Almost makes you want to root for the birds when you watch the old Hitchcock film.
  8. The Beer Man: Last Saturday I went to a surprise birthday party for Johnny Romano, a legendary Oshkosh bartender and standup comic originally from Chicago. While there I got a chance to talk to Appleton Post Crescent writer Jim Lundstrom, a genuinely hilarious guy who used to produce a cable access program, "Strolling on High," with Johnny in the mid 1990s. They would walk around High Ave. in Oshkosh with a camcorder and get people to comment on everything from the ineptitude of the Oshkosh Common Council (much worse now, by the way) to the quality of bar beers. Speaking of beer, Lundstrom writes a column for the PC called "Beer Man" that has gotten national attention. His latest column tells the story of Weihenstephaner Original. Here's an archive of past Beer Man columns. Jim told me that he has been approached by the producers of the Jimmy Kimmel show to possibly do some Beer Man television segments for them. I hope they follow through on that, as it would be great to see a local like Lundstrom get some national exposure.

Best,

-Tony