Eideard

The capital of Wisconsin is buying 600 iPads this spring and plans to buy another 800 this fall, all paid for using funds from the state’s settlement with Microsoft related to consumer lawsuits claiming the company overcharged customers for its software…

Smojver added that the new iPads will enable students to wirelessly share their work and enable schools to replace textbooks with digital apps or ebooks, referring to Apple’s recent announcement related to iBooks 2, iBooks Author and digital textbooks as a “significant development.”

District deputy superintendent Sue Abplanalp noted that Madison administrators had been impressed by the results of an iPad trial by Chicago Public Schools, which found the tablets were successful in keeping students more engaged in the classroom.

Wisconsin’s iPads are being paid for through $3.4 million of the nearly $80 million settlement Microsoft agreed to pay the state to settle claims that it has systematically cheated consumers into paying too much for its software…

Har! Something somewhere in there about karma.

A Wisconsin cemetery worker could spend 10 years in jail after pleading no contest to stealing an electric guitar from a casket.

The cream-colored Fender Telecaster was laid upon the body of Randall Jourdan, who wished to be buried with his “pride and joy,” the criminal complaint said. The guitar was recovered from the suspect’s home the next day.

“I have to have that guitar. It’s too expensive to be in a crypt,” Steven Conard allegedly told a groundskeeper at the Allouez Catholic Cemetery and Chapel Mausoleum near Green Bay where he was working, the complaint said.

Jourdan was a guitar player for more than 40 years, family members told investigators.

Same old, same old. Egregious behavior leading to crime. Whether it’s politics on a mass scale or just some creep deciding his personal “needs” override someone else’s freedom to make decisions on their own life – or death in this case.

One of my old singing partners was buried with two of his guitars. I still would bust anyone trying to despoil his wishes by stealing either axe. But, when I lived in the Navajo Nation I opposed the tradition that allowed families to kill someone’s horse and bury it along with the horse’s owner. I understand it. It’s still demented behavior.

Sara Berg and Victor Giiesbrecht hugging

A motorist who had a heart attack but was kept alive by a stranger whom just minutes earlier he had stopped to help along a Wisconsin interstate has had a tearful reunion with that woman and the first responders who saved his life.

Victor Giesbrecht, 61, expressed his gratitude Wednesday to Sara Berg, the Eau Claire woman who performed CPR on him just a few miles further along the Interstate 94 from where he had helped her to change a tire.

“He said `thank you’ and we hugged, then we both started crying,” Berg told the Eau Claire Leader-Telegram. First responders also attended the reunion at Giesbrecht’s room at Mayo Clinic Health System in Eau Claire…

Giesbrecht, of Winnipeg, Manitoba, and his wife, Ann, were driving to Indiana Nov. 5 when they saw Berg, 40, and her cousin, Lisa Meier, stopped on the side of the interstate with a flat tire. Giesbrecht pulled over, retrieved a jack from his pickup and helped change the flat.

Minutes after driving away, Giesbrecht suffered a heart attack and lost consciousness. His wife brought their pickup to a stop and called 911. Then along came the women whom Giesbrecht had just helped. When Berg, a certified nursing assistant, discovered that Giesbrecht wasn’t breathing, she started CPR. First responders arrived a short time later and used an automated external defibrillator to restore a normal heart rhythm.

“If she wouldn’t have come along, I don’t think we’d be here right now,” Giesbrecht said.

What goes around, come around. Just usually not so soon.

Waiting for the Market to open this morning I came across Margaret Carlson’s excellent analysis.

“It isn’t fair!” is a cry we try in kindergarten and never give up. To tamp down this thirst for instant justice, the nuns at my school invoked the sweet hereafter, where all wrongs would be righted, as a reason for us to suck it up at recess.

As an adult, and a lucky one, the last thing I want now is fairness. I could be waiting on tables instead of being served at them, delivering the papers instead of writing for them.

In that, I’m like Wisconsin’s Republican governor, Scott Walker. He didn’t want fairness to kick in after he assumed power in January and used the rubric of “budget repair” to bully the folks who clean his office and guard his prisoners.

The sweet hereafter made an early appearance in Wisconsin on Tuesday. A Democrat, Chris Abele, cruised to victory in the race to fill Walker’s former post, Milwaukee County executive. And state Supreme Court Justice David Prosser, part of a 4-3 conservative majority seen as likely to support Walker’s assault on unions, ended up in a too-close-to-call election that may result in a recount. Just six weeks ago, Prosser was expected to coast to victory over JoAnne Kloppenburg, an assistant attorney general. Only five incumbent Supreme Court judges have been defeated since 1852.

Ordinarily it takes four years to right an electoral wrong. Not this time. Liberal and conservative groups descended on Wisconsin to turn what would normally be a ho-hum election into a referendum on Walker…

Regardless of the eventual outcome, Kloppenburg’s out-of- nowhere showing is a cautionary tale for those governors following in Walker’s path by curtailing workers’ bargaining rights, and for the Tea Party, which you’d think would be fighting for the little guy, not the big bully…

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Grand Prize Winner Lake Superior Photo Contest 2010
“Lucky Strike,” taken near Ironwood, Michigan
Rob Wiener, Eagle River, Wisconsin

Thanks, Cinaedh

Daylife/Getty Images used by permission

Up to 100,000 people protested at the Wisconsin state Capitol on Saturday against a new law curbing the union rights of public workers that is seen as one of the biggest challenges in decades facing U.S. organized labor.

Madison police spokesman Joel DeSpain estimated the crowd at 85,000 to 100,000 people, which would top the size of protests in Madison during the Vietnam War…

Republicans say the measures are needed to gain control of deficit-ridden budgets. Democrats and their union backers say Republicans are ramming through union-busting proposals.

Protesters on Saturday cheered the Democratic state senators who returned to Wisconsin after fleeing to Illinois for three weeks to try to stall the Legislature’s consideration of the measure.

“It’s so good to be home in Wisconsin,” Democratic Senate Minority Leader Mark Miller told demonstrators, who chanted, “Welcome Home” and “We’re With You.”

“Our fight to protect union rights has become a fight to protect all our rights — a fight to protect democracy,” said Miller. “You have inspired the nation with your passionate and peaceful protests…”

Restrictions on public sector unions have been introduced in a number of other U.S. states with Republican governors, including Indiana, Ohio, Iowa, Michigan and Florida. Some Democrats see it as the opening salvo of the 2012 presidential election because unions are the biggest single contributors to the Democratic Party.

Who knows. This may herald a return to the days when unions provided a much-needed backbone to the Democratic Party.

Yes, you know how much of a cynic I am. Optimist; but, cynic. Lighting a fire under the barely-Left half of America’s political establishment may ignite a matching fire in the eye of politicians who like to say they are allied to the mass of American voters.

On the first day of Christmas, my children gave to me … a vacuum cleaner packaged with $280,000 worth of drugs.

Investigators say a Green Bay woman got quite a surprise Dec. 25 when she opened the refurbished vacuum cleaner she’d been given, and discovered two pounds of crystal methamphetamine and 2.2 pounds of cocaine packaged inside the box.

“This was an ‘are you kidding me’ incident,” said Lt. David Poteat, who heads the Brown County Drug Task Force.

It’s likely that a smuggler inserted the drugs into the vacuum cleaner box before the unit was shipped from the Juarez, Mexico, area, where it had been reconditioned, Poteat said. No one, including the Green Bay retailer who sold the vacuum, noticed anything amiss, he said, until the woman opened the package and called police.

Authorities say they’re convinced the woman played no part in the drug shipment, and don’t plan to charge her. They aren’t identifying the woman, or the store where the vacuum was purchased, while the case is under investigation.

Phew!

The website advertising legal services from Thomas J. Lyon & Associates boasts about Lyon’s victories for clients. “We win cases all the time,” the site says. “It’s what we do…”

But Lyon is not an attorney. He’s been using another person’s Wisconsin Bar license number, that of attorney Thomas J. Lyons who has a practice in St. Paul, Minn., according to a criminal complaint. Lyon also has used the notary stamp of a dead notary public and forged the signature of court officials, the complaint says.

Prosecutors on Friday charged Lyon with practicing law without a license, theft, forgery and related charges tied to Lyon’s legal practice…

The receptionist also said she was one of several prostitutes working for the escort service “Lacuna Limited” that Lyon had set up in Milwaukee. She told an investigator that she helped to recruit new prostitutes for the escort service…

A probation agent told a detective with the Milwaukee County Sheriff’s Office that Lyon is on probation after convictions of grand larceny, stalking and false imprisonment in New York. Lyon’s probation was transferred to Wisconsin, the probation officer told the detective…

The system is better now that it has some checks, he said. But the Minnesota Lyons, the real Lyons said he was amused that the coincidence of the similar names allowed someone to trick court officials.

I don’t think it’s especially amusing that the court officials and everyone from local business folks to the police department never noticed [a] this clown wasn’t a real lawyer and [b] he was fronting a string of hookers.

Doesn’t sound like a surplus of integrity in Milwaukee.

Republicans arrive at 1912 convention – not much has changed

The Obama administration on Thursday rescinded $1.195 billion intended to fund the development of high-speed rail in Ohio and Wisconsin and said it will redirect the funds to “other states eager to develop high-speed rail corridors” in the United States.

“I am pleased that so many other states are enthusiastic about the additional support they are receiving to help bring America’s high-speed rail network to life,” Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said in a statement.

Wisconsin and Ohio both recently elected Republican governors who criticized the federal government for wasteful spending and the high-speed rail program for distracting their states from more pressing infrastructure needs…

Wisconsin and Ohio were set to receive $810 million and $400 million, respectively, for developing rail routes.

Now the money will be given to 14 other states with California, which is the farthest along in its high-speed rail plans, receiving the most. The Transportation Department said California will receive up to $624 million, and Florida will receive the next largest sum, up to $342.3 million.

Sometimes you get what you ask for. No doubt those shiny new Republican governors won’t have any problem telling citizens they didn’t need those jobs – or modernizing transport.

Ken Kratz hard at work defending Wisconsin standards

If a Wisconsin prosecutor’s constituents want him punished for sending sexually suggestive text messages to the victim in a domestic abuse case he was trying, they may have to wait until they can do it themselves — at the polls in two years.

Calumet County District Attorney Ken Kratz called the woman ”a hot, young nymph” and tried to spark a relationship in messages that became publicly known Wednesday through a police report obtained by The Associated Press. On Thursday, a top domestic violence expert and a legislator called on Kratz to resign, and a statewide advocacy group said his actions were unacceptable and had compromised his ability to serve…

The Republican prosecutor in rural eastern Wisconsin doesn’t face re-election until 2012, and appears likely to escape formal punishment. State legal regulators have already found that his actions did not technically amount to misconduct. The state crime victims’ rights board, which Kratz chaired until state officials learned of the texts, isn’t investigating. And Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle, who has the power to seek to remove district attorneys for cause, has been mum on the case.

On Wednesday, Kratz, 50, acknowledged sending 30 text messages to the 26-year-old woman while he was the prosecutor on her case last October. He asked in one whether she’s “the kind of girl that likes secret contact with an older married elected DA…”

The complaint was referred to the Wisconsin Department of Justice. In an e-mail to Kratz, the administrator of the department’s division of legal services, Kevin Potter, rejected his claim that his messages were not sexual and said they could be construed as sexual harassment.

”Telling her several times she is ‘hot’ or referring to her as ‘tall, young hot nymph’ certainly has sexual overtones as do your comments that ‘You are beautiful and would make a great young partner one day’ or ‘I would want you to be so hot and treat me so well that you’d be THE woman! R U that good?”’ Potter wrote.

Has the American public grown so accustomed to self-serving, sleazy politicians that they will return this creep to office? Have both of our TweedleDeeDum parties spent so much time rationalizing away the abusive uses of executive power they don’t even consider removing a thug like this from office?

Both Republicans and Democrats seem to be working as hard as possible to avoid any responsibility to ethical standards, the electorate – or the young woman in the case.