Nothing says effective leader like reassigning your employees to high risk assignments as retaliation for negative things they write about you!

And nothing says Moron of the Week like Milwaukee’s very own Sheriff David Clarke:

A deputy who last week blasted Milwaukee County Sheriff David A. Clarke Jr. in a union newsletter was reassigned Monday to a one-man foot patrol, with no squad car, in the north side area of Milwaukee where a spate of murders has garnered community attention. – JS Online

Yesterday Clarke – who made a failed run at mayor two years ago as the sole Republican – made a gesture of joining his man on the street to ‘offer advice’ and to put a happy spin on the story. He said, “I’m a cop at heart. I like to do police work — old-fashioned police work.” and I thought to myself, “Yeah! Nothing says ‘old-fashioned’ like putting people in dangerous situations because they point out you’re so ‘old fashioned’ that you feel the need for a police escort when walking through the airport!”

Not even Drew Rosenhaus gets a police escort in the airport, and he’s the most hated man in Wisconsin right now, so why does Mr. tough guy Sheriff need one?!

Thankfully, the county is getting involved in this and will hopefully lay down some repremands of their own.

The Governor will be making an announcement about the recent cuts to the UW system budget by the GOP controlled state legislature today at 12pm at the School of Architecture and Urban Planning attrium here on the UWM campus.

The new Chancellor Carlos Santiago will be joining him apparently as well, I’ll try to post anything interesting that happens later on this afternoon.

UPDATE 2pm: About 100-150 people showed up for the Governors announcement that he’ll be reversing the proposed 1.5% pay cut for UW employees (personal note: yay), (re)announced a tuition tax deduction of up to $5,000 for families/students of the UW system, added an additional $8 million in financial aid, and that he’ll be restoring the $40 million that was cut from his proposal by the legislature.

To no ones surprise, Karl Rove is the person who likely outed CIA operative Valerie Plame because her husband disagreed with Bush’s tall tale that Saddam had gotten uranium from Niger.

Yesterday, the Republican defense was to stonewall while they came up with a strategy that’s worked well in the past: whitewash it.

I just don’t get how other honest Republicans can stand by and watch this happening. It’s the same thing with the Guantanamo Bay torture allegations; Democrats seem to be the only ones against torture, and now we’re the only ones who seem to be against outing covert CIA operatives and for protecting national security.

The evidence is painfully obvious with this case, and yet Democrats are the only ones speaking up against this. What a joke.

And I hate to keep pointing it out, but if this was going on with a Democratic president in charge, you’d not only have had his or her ass in front of a grand jury last summer, the rallying cry right now would be impeaching the President because he/she was keeping a federal criminal on staff.

The credibility gap between Democrats and Republicans this year is becoming increasingly wide. On one side, you have people calling for investigations and hearings and on the other you have a party committed to corruption and cover ups.

As expected, the UW regents have increased tuition for all UW schools by 7% for resident students accoringto the Journal Sentinal.

I mentioned last month that the Republican backed state budget proposal would do this very thing.

By contrast, if Democrats were in control of the legislature, there would be a 3% cap on tuition increases.

I usually hesitate to write in the weblog about major news items like today’s bombings in London because for the most part I don’t have anything to add to the already saturated, and usually tragic, stories unfolding.

I did however want to just say that I feel for the people in London, especially for those affected, and wish the folks I know over there the best.

However, as many people on the radio and TV have pointed out today, this was a question not of ‘IF’ but of ‘WHEN’, and I think we as Americans should recognize that as well. Someday, terrorism is going to hit again here in the U.S, just as it did today in England. That’s why it’s frutrating to hear Bush and Blair today talking about how whenever the terrorists attack us, we’re actually beating them, and espcially frustrating because if you follow the President’s rational for attacking Iraq, this shouldn’t be happening anymore.

We are fighting these terrorists with our military in Afghanistan and Iraq and beyond so we do not have to face them in the streets of our own cities. – GWB 10/2004

Yet despite our tragic missteps in Iraq, the terrorists are back at our door.

Well, the political Battle Royale that everyone has been gearing up for is finally here, Bush is going to get to appoint a Supreme Court Justice.

While I’m not going to get too much into it right now, I wish that he would just appoint someone who’s a moderate conservative so we could get on with life and business. Everyone agrees that a moderate conservative like O’Connor would be a consensus candidate and would sail through the confirmation hearings.

But of course that’s not good enough for this administration or the Christian conservative nutjobs who credit themselves with getting Bush re-elected and now have some over-inflated sense of entitlement as a result.

They want an extreme conservative who shares their views. Views like Christianity should be the national religion, women should go back to the dark alleys if they want an abortion, and gays and lesbians should get back in the closet, never mind their civil rights. A small minority of the population with extreme views on societal norms think they should be the ones who get to pick the people who sit on the highest court in this country, and because of that I hope that Democrats and moderate Republicans stand up and take a hard look at anyone Bush sends their way for confirmation.

We’re going to be hearing a lot of commercials in the next few months from the special interest groups who support an extremist judge and the values they represent. They’re going to go directly after Democrats, moderate Republicans, and anyone else who stands in their way by labeling us as ‘obstructionists’ among other things. The President can avoid all that by just appointing a moderate conservative, and I hope he does.

Otherwise, the label of obstructionist is something that I’d be proud to wear if it meant stopping someone who would roll the clock back 50 years on things like womens rights, civil liberties, and state sponsored religion.

Something about the speach the President gave the other night about Iraq has been bugging me all week, and I hadn’t been able to put my finger on it until this morning. On Tuesday night, he said the following early on in his speach:

Like most Americans, I see the images of violence and bloodshed. Every picture is horrifying, and the suffering is real. Amid all this violence, I know Americans ask the question: Is the sacrifice worth it? – GWB

This is of course the line up for the rest of his argument.. “The violence is tough to see, but just stay the course and trust me, and it’ll all work out in the end.”

But as someone who watches more than his fair share of network and cable news, I realized today that I have very rarely seen any images of hardcore violence on TV news, and especially have never seen any sort of bloodshed.

In fact, the most violent images I can remember seeing was a few months ago when there was a lot of talk about how a marine sqaud had entered an mosque and one of the marines flipped out and shot an injured unarmed man in the head.

It was all caught on video tape, and it showed on some of the networks and all of the cable news stations right up to the point where the marine leveled his rifle at the guys head. Then it cut back to the anchorperson who rattled off the line about “due to the graphic nature…”.

But that was it, and that was 3-6 months ago. In his speach, the President makes it sound like there’s a daily filmreel on the evening news that shows people getting killed, maimed, and injured, when the fact is that most networks hardly even mention the service members who got killed, much less show any footage of violence.

The same goes for the daily car bombings. Once in a while, CNN or MSNBC will show a tape of a car bomb going off, but that is a somewhat rare occasion.

So I guess I’m wondering which images the President is seeing, and if maybe I’m not seeing all this bloodshed and violence he’s referring to.