Brewers swept the Indians last night, and while my kickball team was on an offensive roll last night and won 21-1, I managed to seriously pull my right quad. I then compounded the problem by continuing to play. Happy Thursday, put me in coach!

• Tweet of the day from the local NBC affiliates weather guy: “@CraigKoplien: Watching big storms in Iowa. Could get to Milwaukee at 3-4-ish if they hold together. Also could weaken or dive into IL.” Yeah…. it could also snow or be totally sunny! Who knows?!  We’ll throw it up against the wall and see what sticks!
• The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s Patrick McIlheran continues to just make things up about me. It’s why he’s one of the most respected editorial writers on his street.
• If the weather holds up this evening, and I’d recommend looking outside instead of relying on the local weather guy above, join me at the opening “Music in the Gardens” event at 6pm in the Boerner Botanical Gardens. The Milwaukee Symphony Pops will be playing, admission to the gardens is free for the concert and there will be food and beverages on site. Stop by the Park People booth to say hi!

A gentleman by the name of Dan Sebring is apparently running as a Republican in Wisconsin’s reliably Democratic 4th Congressional District against two term Congresswoman Gwen Moore.

Welcome to the race Mr. Sebring, good for you for getting involved in the political process. I do however have one small piece of advice. I know it may seem silly that the oppositions Vice Chair of the district would offer advice, but it’s true!

When announcing your candidacy in your initial press release, starting it off with:

Previously unknown Republican business owner ramps up campaign

Might not exactly be how you want to set the tone, ya know? I could be wrong of course, but when trying to gain visibility and name ID, it’s usually a good idea to not come across as forgettable in the very first sentence.

I’ll leave it there for now, but you get the idea I think. Good luck in your campaign.

Brewers go for the sweep tonight in against the Tribe, my kickball team is in action tonight with our awesome 0-0-1 record, and today marks the 15 year anniversary of the infamous low speed chase of OJ Simpson and a white Bronco. I still remember where I was when watching that… Anywho, happy Wednesday!

• I’ve been hearing about some local handgun folks making some noise about their “right” to carry handguns in Milwaukee County Parks. It’s no secret I feel some of these people are off their rockers, and the last wave of hate mail and threats that I got after I last expressed that opinion only confirms that suspicion. Parks are a place for peace and enjoyment. A bunch of gun totting cowboys trying to prove a point about the manhood on their hip is directly in conflict with the mission of the parks. Plus, it’s illegal to carry firearms on County Grounds…
• There’s a disturbing trend that’s being noticed over the past several months by myself and others of local “citizen journalists/bloggers” writing something one week and it magically appearing in the paper or on TV the next. Some of it may be coincidence of course, but the “coincidences” are happening with more regularity of late. It’s almost as if local bloggers are doing all the legwork and some reporters are just trolling local weblogs for story ideas without crediting their source. Not cool.
• It’s about time that Federal employees who are gay/lesbian will get benefits for their partners. One local radio talk show host seems very upset that “OUR!” tax dollars are being used for something like this! He’s completely missing the point, as often happens with debates about “taxpayers”, that same sex couples, you know, pay taxes too… Also, I’m sure there are racists out there who are equally angry that “THEIR!” tax dollars are being spent on benefits for mixed or interracial couples as well. Nuts aside, it’s something that’s been long overdue, and is one less instance of discrimination in America.
• Oh, and another sitting Republican Senator in hot water. This time, it’s Senator John Ensign of Nevada admitting an affair with a female aide… Moral majority!

I’m on a bit of a roll with rap artist birthdays lately, so how about this: Tupac Shakur, had he not been killed in 1996, would be turning 38 today. Happy Tuesday!

• If certain Republican Senators are so against a “public” insurance option as a way to start reforming health care in this Country, maybe they should refuse to take their government provided insurance as a way to show just how “against” it they are. It is in effect what the Obama administration is proposing.. Oh wait, then they’d be uninsured?? Exactly.
• Just a thought… If Iranians do manage to overthrow a corrupt government, it won’t be because a bunch of Twitter icons were shaded green. Show your support and stand in solidarity and all, but there’s a bit of a difference between literally putting your life on the line against a corrupt government because you believe in freedom and coloring your picture green on a social networking site.
• I very much had a case of the Mondays when I failed to mention that over the course of the weekend at the DPW convention, we elected the youngest party chair in the Country. Mike Tate, the new DPW chair, is 30 years old and I personally look forward to working with him.

I also failed to note that my Red Wings lost the Stanley Cup finals last Friday night. They had a great season and all, but losing the championship is always tough.

Congratulations are in order!  Today there was an unveiling ceremony for Bradford Beach’s new “Blue Wave” certification, the first national environmental certification for beaches.  The Blue Wave certification process is designed to help maintain robust, healthy, and vibrant beaches. Milwaukee’s Bradford Beach is one of a handful of beaches in the Country to receive this very important award.

County Exec. Walker and Parks Director Sue Black were on hand to announce the certification and to recognize the significant contributions of the private and public sector to make this happen. I was able to speak with the Mr. Walker after the event and he was very gracious with praise for all the groups, companies and organizations that made this certification a reality.

Bradford Beach had a reputation for many years as being dirty, smelly and something to be avoided at all costs, which was really a tragedy considering what a great summertime destination it used to be. In fact, when Jenny and I were married in Lake Park which overlooks Bradford Beach, I was worried that if the wind wasn’t blowing the right direction, our wedding ceremony would be best remembered for the terrible rotting smell rolling up off the lake.

Thankfully that didn’t happen on our wedding day, and thanks to this certification, it’s not likely to happen in the future. The turnaround of Bradford Beach over the past few years has been nothing short of amazing.

Finally, a beautiful weekend weather wise in Milwaukee! Believe it or not one of the rap worlds most enduring icons, O’Shea Jackson, turns 40 today. You may recognize him by his stage name, Ice Cube.

• The Brewers continue to suffer from some tough losses in June, going 3-7 in their last 10. On the upside: if you’re going to get cold, it helps to be cold when the rest of your division is. Despite a rocky June, they’re still in first place by a half game.
• Had a good time in Green Bay this weekend at the Democratic Party of Wisconsin convention. It’s always nice to network with folks from across the State and hear the enthusiasm of so many of our members. It’s hard to believe, but around this time last year, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were still fighting for the Democratic nomination. And how about Charles Woodson for Governor?!
• Speaking of politics, the Park People are going to be issuing a press release later today to clarify our desire for parks, recreation and culture to be included in any proposed sales tax coming out of the budget process. Many of us were caught a bit off guard when the parks component of the funding was removed in the Assembly and have to redouble our efforts with State Senators.

Go ahead and read this blog post from the Journal Sentinels token “right wing” columnist, if you can stomach it.

Why is he trying to defend and distance conservatives from the white supremacist killer who killed a security guard at the Holocaust Museum earlier this week? The answer is easy, because right-wing “leaders” across the Country, who he cribs 90% of his ideas from are doing the same. Heaven forbid Pat’s cable went out and he couldn’t get to Michelle Malkin’s weblog for a few days, because he’d probably have no clue what to write about.

At any rate, there’s a lot of just ridiculous talk out there from the far right that this white supremacist may in fact have been a liberal!! And if he wasn’t a liberal, he was PUSHED by liberals to the edge of insanity. I don’t know what political leanings the guy had personally, but what does it have to do with the murder he committed or his hatred of anyone who wasn’t a white Christian? Secondly, why are conservatives all the sudden so hell bent on trying to place blame on liberals for what this guy did. It’s an appallingly stupid (a word I use rarely) argument that some are making for no reason other than to take a swing at “liberals”.

But that doesn’t stop McIlheran from picking up where they left off… with ellipses!

He manages to turn this story away from what it really is, a white supremacist anti-government nutjob who murdered an innocent man, and into a pro NRA diatribe that makes the same old tired  jabs at liberals (New York Times!) that we all expect from Patrick. And as we’ve also come to expect from Pat, his incoherent rambling fails to land any of them.

There’s a place for constructive, intelligent conservative opinions in every paper, MJS included. McIlherans columns are none of those things however. They are simply a logically disjointed and  poorly paraphrased version of what he saw on the Glen Beck show last night.

Wisconsin’s largest newspaper can, and should, do better.

This is discouraging…

Assembly Democrats dialed back a proposed sales tax increase for Milwaukee County, voting to allow the sales tax to rise 0.65% but not the full 1% recommended earlier by legislators, according to information released early Thursday morning.

Most of the sales tax increase — 0.5% — would go for Milwaukee County buses. The remaining 0.15% would go for public safety. If approved, the change would allow the County Board to raise the sales tax from 5.6% to 6.25%.

The Joint Finance Committee last month recommended increasing the sales tax 1% to pay for buses, parks and public safety.

It’s important to remember as this goes through the Legislature that the referendum that passed in Milwaukee County last Fall was to grant a 1% sales tax for parks, transit, and EMS services. It was not a referendum on a 0.5% sales tax for transit. It was not a referendum for a 0.5% sales tax for parks, recreation and culture.

There will need to be a huge thrust to get the original intent of Milwaukee County voters support for a combined parks/transit/EMS solution back into the Senate version of the budget.

As I mentioned yesterday, a recall against Sen. Jim Sullivan was filed by a group or person (still not sure which as the reports haven’t show up online yet) with the help of the Citizens for Responsible Government.

They issued the following press release today trying to make some kind of comparison between their partisan recall and… The American Revolution!

CRG Network: Grassroots group files for recall of Sen. Sullivan
6/9/2009

For more information call Bill Savage at 218-0959 or Orville Seymer at 414-573-8709.

Recall of Jim Sullivan: Is America’s first chapter in history beginning to repeat itself right here in Wisconsin’s 5th Senate District?

Today, in Wisconsin’s fifth senate district, the passion for liberty and freedom that our forefathers demonstrated so many generations ago for freedom is alive and well.

We will not tolerate one more tax, one more anti-business policy and most of all; we will not lose one more freedom to special interest groups with a hidden agenda.

When the citizens fear their government, it is called tyranny. When the government fears the people, it is called freedom.

When our government becomes “out of touch” to the point that they might as well be an ocean away, when the government tramples on liberty, freedom and personal property rights, we have the responsibility and the duty to stand up for the rights that so many of our fathers and forefathers fought and died for.

So today we are filing a recall of State Senator Jim Sullivan. We are standing up for freedom and liberty.

Tyranny, freedom, forefathers, liberty!

But really, how is there any comparison among rational people between the American revolution and the partisan recall of an elected official for the bogus reason that he voted to ban smoking in the workplace?

And for extra irony, there’s the part that derides “special interest groups with a hidden agenda“.

Summer? Hello, Summer? Happy chilly Tuesday. Brewers are back in action tonight and the Red Wings can wrap up the Stanley Cup tonight in Pittsburgh.

• There’s a serious problem with vandalism going on throughout Wauwatosa over the last couple months. There’s been vandalism at Jacobus Park, Hoyt Park, the splash pad at Madison park was vandalized and broken, and just the other night, a police car was caught in a “boobytrap” again in Hoyt Park that forced the officer to call for a tow truck. The idiots who are pulling these stunts need to be caught and punished. It’s a serious drain on the already overtaxed budget and resources of the County Parks and Police department to deal with this stuff.
• Glad to see conservatives have formulated their masterful plan to take back Congress in 2010: boycott General Motors!
• Speaking of conservatives, welcome to day 22 of the Republican Renaissance! If it still looks and sounds a lot like day 1, there’s a good reason for that.
• Jazzy Jeff was kicked off stage at a concert in Kansas City last weekend for… wait for it… playing rap! Who was running this concert, Mark Belling? And who would book Jazzy Jeff and then be surprised he was playing “rap” anyways?! No word yet from the Fresh Prince, but it’s just another reason not to like Cow Town.
• And just so there’s no confusion about the piece I wrote yesterday questioning Eugene Kane’s implication that “citizen blogging” was “dead”, it was nothing against him personally. I look forward to reading his columns, especially in the Sunday paper. I’ve never met him, but respect the work he does and the voice he gives to a segment of the population that is all too often absent from the major news outlets in Milwaukee. I simply disagreed with the question he posed.

Eugene Kane blogs today about the irrelevancy of blogging and asks, “The end of blogging?”:

Just a few years ago, citizen bloggers were all the rage. They were actually going to replace the mainstream media, remember?

The successful blogs in today’s media are actually pretty mainstream, particularly political blogs that are frequently cited by newspaper columnists or editorial writers. The days of solitary citizen bloggers sending their opinions out into the blogosphere to attract attention seem to be a thing of the past.

As this article points out, it’s more about Twitter and Facebook these days.

This is interesting - and incorrect -  on a number of levels. First, the hype about ‘citizen bloggers’ that reached it’s fever pitch just a year or two ago was inflated by the very same traditional media that’s now predicting it’s death. You couldn’t pick up a copy of the newspaper or periodical that wasn’t hyping how these “citizen bloggers” were going to change the world(!).

People who write weblogs that happened to be filling the considerable gaps in local coverage by the local traditional media never set out with the goal of being labeled some silly ‘citizen blogger/journalist’ tag. They did it because there was a need for coverage of local events the traditional media wasn’t willing to waste their time on.

Ironically, it was the very same traditional media who’s lack of  “real” issue coverage provided the opportunity for regular folks with weblogs to make a niche that was gushing over this new corps of average Joe/Jane reporters. In their race to sensationalize and exploit a pretty simple concept - average people taking more interest in their communities - they only continued to emphasize the ’style over substance’ mentality that was in part the cause of their own struggles and decline.

Secondly, about Twitter and Facebook… That’s either a gross misunderstanding of what those services do, or an admission that you have no idea what kind of role weblogs serve.

Twitter and Facebook - two services I utilize myself - are nothing more than tools. Useful and practical tools to be sure, but tools the same way that weblogs or email are. They’re different kinds of tools that fit different kinds of jobs. For someone to say weblogs are useless because Facebook or Twitter is “where it’s at” is about as ridiculous as someone stating that every screwdriver and saw in their toolbox was useless because they were momentarily pounding a nail into a piece of wood with a hammer.

Over the years, it’s become easy to identify people who talk about technology and emerging social networking & communication tools but have zero understanding of their utility because all those people share a common trait: predicting the death of one tool in order to justify their excitement/focus of the ‘next big thing’.

Listening to some ‘experts’ out there, e-mail has been ‘dead’ for nearly a decade. Yet it remains the most popular way for people on the Internet to communicate period. The same with weblogs. The same will happen to Twitter, and the same will happen to everything after that. In some ways, it’s the nature of people who don’t truly understand any of the ways these things can, do and will work in harmony as part of a complete tool box.

That’s because as impractical and limiting as it would be for me to have nothing but a set of hammers to be able to use in building a house or fixing my car, it would be impractical to rely solely on something like Twitter with it’s limits of 140 characters and limited reach.

How could I have gotten past the first sentence in writing my thoughts here if I had to rely just on Twitter? Or Facebook?

Of course, the inverse is true as well of weblogs. Sometimes a weblog isn’t the right tool for quick blurbs about where I’m at or what I’m doing as Twitter might be. Likewise, there are a million things that Facebook does that no weblog can ever hope match.

So when I need to write something that requires both thought and explanation unencumbered by length or word count, I’ll use my weblog just as when I need to change a spark plug, I’ll skip over the stapler or hex wrench and select the right tool for the job.

Or more likely, as I do today, I’ll continue to use the tools together to make the combined product more effective than any one could be on it’s own.

Finally, I get that perhaps it was just an off the cuff remark by Mr. Kane, who’s articles I enjoy in the MJS, and nothing serious was meant of it. But I also realize that his employer has gone all in first the weblogging craze, then the Facebook thing, and most recently you couldn’t open up a copy of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel without being forced to get the “Twitter angle” in every one of it’s stories.

Perhaps if they spent less time jumping from craze to anointed craze or spending resources on silly ‘tweet shows’ that add zero value to journalism where they show elderly folks “why the craze matters!” as a way of justifying their own attention to it, and focused more on, you know, reporting the news instead of capitalizing on a fad, they wouldn’t be slashing jobs left and right.

As for the answer to Mr. Kane’s question, “The end of blogging?”… Well, I don’t get into the business of making predictions in the world of technology, but I’d bet a small wager that the “citizen bloggers” like me are still here and still digging long after the Journal Sentinel has declared bankruptcy and closed it’s doors.