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The newly renovated Hoyt Park pool in Wauwatosa is expected to open this weekend in time for Memorial Day, according to a Milwaukee County board news release.

Hoyt Pool (photo provided by Milwaukee County)

In 2003, the county closed the pool, which was built in 1939, due to structural problems. The Friends of Hoyt Park and Pool raised about $8 million to pay for the renovations, including a $4 million grant from the TOSA Foundation.

The new facility will feature “heated water, competitive lap lanes, water slides, zero-depth entry, a sand play area and other aquatic center features.” The former bathhouse was renovated and could one day become a “coffee shop or casual restaurant.”

In January, a minor explosion at the construction site sent two workers to the hospital with non-life threatening injuries.

Before it was closed in 2003, the Hoyt Park pool (which will now be called the “Tosa Pool at Hoyt Park”) was considered the largest outdoor pool in the state.

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Federal officials will be in Menomonee County, Wis., today to launch a new national initiative aimed at reducing obesity in Native American youth.

Larry Echo Hawk

It’s part of First Lady Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move!” campaign encouraging children to be physically active for at least an hour every day and pushing parents to provide them with healthy meals.

The new effort, called “Let’s Move in Indian Country,” will be announced at the Woodland Bowl Amphitheater in Keshena.

Larry Echo Hawk, assistant secretary of Indian Affairs and a member of the Pawnee Nation, will be traveling to Menomonee County along with representatives from the Office of the First Lady, the White House and Native American actor Chaske Spencer, who played roles in the Twilight films.

According to the campaign, about a third of children in the U.S. are either overweight or obese – but the percentage for Native American and Alaska Native youth is even greater, about half.

About 24,000 people live in Menomonee County, and almost all live within the Menominee Indian Reservation.

The county is impoverished and has many public health problems. It ranked last (72 out of 72 counties) in the 2011 edition of the UW Population Health Institute’s rankings of Wisconsin counties by health outcomes, health factors and mortality.

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Voters in upstate New York hand a safe Republican seat to a long-shot Democrat who beat her opponent with a blunt instrument: Wisconsin Representative Paul Ryan’s politically-tone-deaf ‘plan’ to trash Medicare and hand billions, trillions in public-dollar Medicare voucher payments to private insurers.

And that bit of calculated cleverness – - exempting people over 55, but sticking it to younger people – - badly backfired: who would support a plan that will cut the standard of living and quality of medical care for the under-55 generation, and perhaps also impoverish their parents who might have to burn through their savings to take care of younger relatives whose vouchers ran out?

All while enriching insurance companies.

People are not as stupid as Ryan and the GOP assumed.  These Republicans yammer in their ideological, bumper-sticker dialectic about “personal choices vs. Government,” when, in fact, people like Medicare and told the GOP in the upstate NY congressional election they “choose” it over insurance company profits and a voucher scheme they know will come up short with their first medical crisis.

At 55, they could face decades of shortfall and heartbreak – - and they understand that the Ryan plan would make it all worse.

Next to feel the Ryan sting: Senate Republicans who are going to be forced to vote up or down on the Ryan plan because the bumbling Majority Leader John Boehner rammed it through the House and sent it on to the Senate where it never had a chance of approval, given the Democrats majority.

This is what the politics of overreach, ideological blindness and extreme Ryan Worship are bringing on to the GOP.

It will be interesting to watch Republicans in the Senate run from what is becoming Ryan’s Distress; GOP leaders and talk show hosts from Rush Limbaugh to Charlie Sykes in Milwaukee were so heavily-invested in Ryan’s now-fading persona as The Smartest Gun In Congress that they will have to spin their way around the NY results and also from Ryan – - though throwing him under the bus would be too much an admission of their own failure to see the fallacies and risk in Ryan’s scheme.

But they will pull the bus to the side of the road, let him off far from his destination – - the speaking circuit, maybe the road to The White House in 2016 – - and suggest that on his walk home alone that he find an out-of-the-way dumpster to drop that plan of his, and fast, because everyday it’s out there it’s a serious drag on the Party of Overreach.

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The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has obscenely served as handmaiden and enabler as the radical Republicans in Madison continue to take a blunt ax to state government and democracy.  The paper has sat on the sidelines, alternately cheering, offering encouragement and laughably trying to talk some sense to the nonsensical.  Having endorsed Scott Walker for governor, the Journal Sentinel will have nothing but blood on its hands as the Republican jihad continues to damage the middle class and the working poor, while lavishing supposedly scarce state funds on the rich and the road builders.

On its news pages, the paper has been bad enough.  Its PolitiFact project has run interference for Walker and his fellow travelers (not the least of which: would-be Medicare-killer Paul Ryan), “ruling” that black is white and red is blue on numerous occasions – always for the benefit of some Republican scheme or personality. 

When state school superintendent Tony Evers had the temerity to call out the school choice scam as the fraud that it is this week – especially when the public schools are taking an $834 million hit in Walker’s radical budget document – the news story on the entirely justified rant by Evers was staged as a point-counterpoint exercise where everything Evers said was allowed to be countered by some dweeb at the heavily-right-wing-funded School Choice Wisconsin prop “organization”. 

“Low-income students in MPS have higher academic achievement, particularly in math,” says Evers; “choice” “students” graduate at a higher rate, says the flunky.  “Choice” “schools” are dependent on public funding, says Evers; an “exaggeration”, says the Koch-funded mouthpiece.  It’s an amazing piece of slanted reporting, pitting the elected DPI chief with over 25 years in school advocacy and administration against a hired gun for out-of-state interests interested only in destroying the notion of public education.

But, if you expect bad from the increasingly talk-radio-inspired right-wing tilt of the news pages managed by George Stanley, you can expect the absolute worst from the pathetic editorials supervised by the new editorial page editor, David Haynes. 

The latest outrage among many for the editorial “we” in the sad Walker era is a “laurel” the paper bestowed on the governor in Saturday’s paper for an alleged “upswing” in the perception of Wisconsin as a “good place to do business”.  The excuse for this undeserved award was a new ranking of Wisconsin in the supposed “best states to do business” in Chief Executive magazine. Wisconsin jumped 14 places in the annual survey of 500 Monty Moneybags running businesses from the rarified air of their penthouse suites and mahogany-appointed offices around the country. 

Thus did Wisconsin (24) leap-frog over supposed business hell-holes like Oregon (33), Minnesota (29) and New Mexico (32) to join such august company as North Dakota (21), Kansas (25) and Alabama (26).  I mean, what state doesn’t aspire to be as attractive as Alabama? Still literally in the middle of the pack, Wisconsin has a ways to go to claim the same lofty heights as Texas (1), Indiana (6) and Georgia (5).  Be ye not too bold Wisconsin – with any luck, next year we can be as “good” as Oklahoma (11).

This is all nuts, of course. Nobody with any sense would choose any of those places over Wisconsin to live or do business.  The quality of life has always been the most attractive incentive for people to do business here.  The fact that Walker’s attack on the middle class and the environment might make the state more attractive to those who are only interested in raping and pillaging both is not a good thing.  Making Wisconsin safe for strip mining should not be anyone’s goal, regardless of how many dirty, dangerous, unhealthy temporary jobs it might create.

But the CEOs who casually position copies of Chief Executive on their office credenzas to read while their assistants fetch their lattes to read up on the best way to spend their perks of power (“the trick to buying second homes is always following your heart — and never having to pack”) are the last people to decide what is best for the state of Wisconsin.  As they fly over the dusty flat land of, say, Nebraska (20) in their private jets, they see – if the politicians are cooperative enough – opportunities not to make the world a better place, but to exploit resources and a weakened, powerless workforce without having to deal with the inconvenience of effective government.

For the Journal Sentinel to fall for this bullshit in a glossy niche magazine with a circulation of about 40,000 as evidence of anything is the height of deliberate cluelessness.  Unable to call the Madison Republicans out for the radicals they are, the Kings of State Street act as willing fluffers to Scott Walker as he prepares to wind up and deliver the next item on the Koch brothers’ agenda.  Their weakness, even when they have to disagree (“legislators need to think carefully” about throwing state money at the rich in the form of venture capital. Whoa, take it easy there, Haynes.  You wouldn’t want to be accused of having an un-talk-radio opinion) is pathetic.

“Perception isn’t everything, but it does count for something” starts the ridiculous “laurel” to the radical governor. Yes, it does.  And the Journal Sentinel stands perceived as a ludicrous enabler of a dangerous, power-drunk Republican party in Madison.  Just like “my” state senator, the soon-to-be-recalled Alberta Darling, the paper stands by, makes excuses and, when push comes to shove, props up the wrong people and casts the wrong votes.  Darling will be recalled, fired and sent home.  The Kings of State Street deserve the same fate.

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A handful of billionaires and right-wing think tanks and foundations are pushing school voucher legislation nationwide, with the goal and effect of undermining public education. These schemes funnel huge taxpayer dollars to private schools while taking from public schools roughly an equal amount of dollars.

Think Progress, a progressive policy forum, helps put into context just how awful Gov. Scott Walker’s education priorities truly are, by showing us that Walker is on the leading edge of a suddenly burgeoning right-wing movement nationally that is focused on turning public education into private education.

The site offers up a new survey report, “The Billionaires Who Want to Privatize Our Schools” (link below). The piece mentions Wisconsin Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Evers’ screed this week against state legislators who “immorally” take funds from public schools to pay for private education.

Think Progress notes that, “Between 1966 and 2000, vouchers were put up for a vote in states 25 times, and voters rejected the program 24 of those times. Yet despite this historic unpopularity, voucher programs are exploding across the United States.”

The report tellingly makes the following, often overlooked double whammy faced by public schools:

“Indeed, it is a stunning statement on Walker’s priorities to have championed nearly $900 million in education cuts in his budget proposal while at the same time proposing a $750 million expansion of the state’s voucher system.”

And what is the right wing’s real agenda here? Improving education, or transforming it into something more user-friendly for economic and political elites? One voice from the right just comes right out and lets slip the underlying goal. From the Think Progress piece:

Joseph Bast, the president and CEO of the Heartland Institute, may’ve explained the real thinking behind vouchers in 2002, saying, “The complete privatization of schooling might be desirable, but this objective is politically impossible for the time being. Vouchers are a type of reform that is possible now, and would put us on the path of further privatization.”

That’s quite obviously also the modus operandi for GOP governors in Pennsylvania, Florida
and elsewhere.

The full Think Progress report, which names names and traces the connection between well-heeled interests and GOP politicians, is at:

http://pr.thinkprogress.org/2011/05/pr20110524/index.html

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Wow, listen to this test of the Milwaukee Fire Department doing a test with their OpenSky radios… Don’t our first responders deserve better than this crap?

Hat tip to John, a.k.a. MKEScan

Most of you know the details about Milwaukee OpenSky radio system. Now the Fire Dept is installing these radios even though cops say there are audio & coverage problems. Listen to the MFD audio here compared to the county radio system which Milwaukee could of switched over to and saved the City about 10 million depending on who you want to believe

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Republican Legislators who want to set arbitrary 300-day mining permit review deadlines – - this to give a proposed four-mile-long open pit mine near Lake Superior a quickie approval – - are said to considering a concession to an outraged public: adding 65 days to their arbitrary review scheme to make it a nice, neat one-year.

Is there any science, data, experience that says 365 days is the magic number? Why not 366? Or 500?

This is legislating with calculators, Ouija boards and dice. The whole approach is condescending and over-the-top political.

And needs to be rejected.

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I support concealed carry but the notion that it ought to be extended without the requirement of a license and training is to carry a sound principle too far. Let’s compare, of all things, the recently passed voter ID bill. People have a constitutional right to vote. But that doesn’t mean that the state may not place reasonable regulations on the manner in which that right is exercised to protect the rights of others.

To be sure, the restrictions normally placed on concealed carry may be more onerous than simply requiring a photo ID but the state interests justify them. It would be a different matter if the registration and training requirements were used to frustrate concealed carry rights but sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.

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Mike Ellis can’t gavel down the truth: the Voter ID bill is a voter suppression bill.

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