Brew City Brawler

Sweet Gesu, the new Hold Steady "album" is amazing

Because the Brawler is of that age demographic/mind frame that needs his music packaged in physical form, he picked up the Hold Steadys' latest see-dee "Stay Positive" and oh my lord is it awesome. It's not "Separation Sunday" -- that is a very (a bad adjective in this case justified) special album of which there are few -- but after 1.9 listenings, it is a fab album. Singalongs, invocations of 7 Seconds, some stretching beyond their trademark reliable Husker Du by way of the E Street Band sound (banjo by J Mascis! Theremin!) and meditations upon growing old, murder, guilt and other Craig Finn (a hedgehog, not a fox) obsessions,it is a fabulous piece of work. Hold Steady have produced as solid a body of music in their four full-length "albums" as anyone over these past several years. And Minneapolis suburb boy Craig Finn has grown into the sharp, smart, vernacular lyricist that Paul Westerberg always wanted to be. "So I mostly just pray she won't die"? Yow. That's from "Lord I'm Discouraged" (with the tuneful singalong refrain "excuses and half truths and fortified wine":

The guy shredding the Jimmy Page double ax is Janesville's own Tad Kubler. Bassist Galen Polivka would be Whitefish Bay's Phil Lynott if Phil Lynott had been of Eastern European descent as opposed to Black (literally) Irish.

And here's some Auld Steady:

Charlie Sykes' crappity crap crap economic analysis

Charlie Sykes is a rich man who nevertheless keeps (or recently kept) a balance on high-interest-rate credit cards -- and then complained to his audience when he switched to a different card and found he'd been hoodwinked by the small print and didn't get the low rate he thought he would receive.

Clearly, Sykes is preeminently qualified for serious economic analysis. And on Monday he lived up to his home ec standards, by suggesting that the decline in stocks is attributable to Wall Street nervousness over Obama's seemingly inevitable march to the White House.

To buttress his point --actually buttress is too weak a word as all Sykes did is recast it and link to it on his blog -- he refers to some dumbass columnist at MSN Money by the name of Jon Markman.

Markman's piece is amusing insofar as it refers to "common wealthy people" -- just like you and me! -- as opposed to institutional investors (who, including folks like Warren Buffett and Bill Gross, don't seem to overly mind Obama):

It's just that Obama's rhetoric on taxes and health care is scaring common wealthy people with large capital gains from investments made over the past decade, and a lot of them don't want to wait around to see whether it's just populist fluff that might be set aside once he takes office.

Plus, the Democrats who run Congress know that a weaker economy favors their nominee -- and they are loath to pass banking or trade legislation now to improve the nation's industrial standing over fears that it could backfire and give comfort to the Republicans. And finally, there is a well-founded anxiety that one-party rule in Washington for at least the next two years will bring about the sort of abuse of power that has gotten both parties into trouble over the past few decades.

Er, what trade bill in Congress would dramatically improve our industrial standing? And there's no comparison in the "abuse of power" on matters fiscal between Dem one-party rule and GOP one-party rule in the past 40 years. None.

Markman's dumbassery goes tilt with this paragraph however:

For one measure of investors' fear that their hard-won battle for better tax treatment of stock dividends is in danger of being overturned, look at the behavior of the iShares Select Dividend Index Fund (DVY, news, msgs), an exchange-traded fund that tracks the performance of the stocks that pay the highest dividend yields. It's down 24% this year -- almost twice the 13% decline of the broad market. The steepest part of that decline came after June 1, when it became clear that Obama had bested New York Sen. Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination.

Dude, maybe the reason that ETF has tanked is because it's 42.3 percent invested in financial services -- which have taken a beating as, you know, the whole financial services sector is in near meltdown mode with talk of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac being bailed out, Bear Stearns imploding and IndyMac exploding.

But Markman pins it on Obama clearly besting Hillary for the nom -- as if it weren;t obvious to the smart money long before that. (And why would Hillary be less threatening to the innarrests on health care, f'rinstance?)

A "high level" of economic discussion.

And, this just in ... the economy and the markets fare better under Democratic presidents!

Shark and Shepherd counsels cut and run...

In Green Bay:

As frustrated as they may be, Thompson and McCarthy are doing the wrong thing. They should take him [Favre] back.

But if Thompson and McCarthy relent, dominoes fall, the terrorists win and no one will believe in the  resolve of America's Team!

And seriously, if Brett Favre were the quarterback best equipped to take Green Bay to the Super Bowl ... he would have taken Green Bay to the Super Bowl last year.Seriously, at the beginning of last season if someone told you that Eli Manning would own Brett Favre at Lambeau in the NFC Championship game, what would you have believed said person?

The evidence couldn't be more clear -- although Iraq's lack of WMDs and lack of operational connections to al Qaeda was even more obvious. Thompson's in the right here.

Also: Who's this "Rogers" guy Esenberg refers to? Did he meet with Mohammed Atta in Vienna?

Shark and Shepherd's Rick Esenberg is teh funny

Recently, Rick Esenberg had this to say:

My second post ("Being serious ...) was prompted by commenters who repeated the slander that "Bush lied and people died." If you believe that, I do think that you are either misinformed or hopelessly partisan; even not serious.

He had this to say of Charlie Sykes:

 I do listen regularly to Sykes and I think your description of him is just wrong. He needs to be entertaining so he gets polemical but, for a general audience talk show, I think the discussion on his show takes place on a remarkably high level.

So let's see..."Bush Lied, People Died" -- a slogan based on the absolutely correct premise that the Bush administration deliberately misrepresented and overhyped the intelligence on Iraq to justify the invasion -- is slander. While Sykes -- who has cast Jim Doyle as a segregationist, a criminal or just calls him "despicable;" who insinuates that the people who voted for Michael McGee were thugs themselves; who routinely calls liberals unpatriotic or worse; who routinely twists facts to make his "point" -- somehow represents a "high level" of discussion.

Got it.

Also on the topic of Sykes, Esenberg seems wildly overgenerous in his interpretation of how Sykes discusses issues in the "central city"(i.e. black people).

But so is every conservative I know - even the dread Charlie Sykes who I have yet to hear, as Mike claims, give a lecture about "racism being understandable and black people getting what they deserve." To the contrary, what underlies his concern - and mine - about street violence is a strong conviction that black people - who are overwhelmingly its victims - don't "deserve it."

I don't know ... but when I listen to Charlie Sykes I hear him:

• call people lined up at the Coggs Center for free food vouchers moochers and suggest they're all chiselers
• say Milwaukee voters (i.e. blacks) will vote to require private employers offer sick days because they're shiftless
• read a story of some teens robbing a Wauwatosa family and conclude by asking if people seriously believes a summer jobs program would have stopped them (this was some years ago)
• categorically reject any argument that economics have played a role in the central city's meltdown and instead blame it on the "culture" or people just not taking responsibility for their lives
• use the tragic drowning of a child at a family pool party at a downtown hotel to riff on the sickness of the "culture" yet ignore the story of a Waterford girl who nearly drowned at a house party

And so on.

The Brawler allows that Charlie Sykes has some compassion for inner city crime victims. But the Brawler also suggests that he's more concerned with trundling out right wing talking points (Charles Murray, your office is calling) or stoking the flames of self-righteous indignation among his listeners in Oconomowoc. You know: entertainment.

UPDATE: The Brawler realizes he has been whinging on about Esenberg for some time now ... All the Brawler can say that the whole myth of  "Bush acted in good faith/everyone else got it wrong" is so well-established now that it's going to enter into the rightwing canon of big lies along with "the media lost Vietnam," "The New Deal dragged out the Depression" and "Wisconsin's generous welfare benefits attracted shiftless African Americans up from Chicago."

This despite the facts that, as the Brawler has been whinging, the Bush Administration made claims about Iraqi and WMDs that went far beyond what the intelligence showed; that the Bush Administration was packed with proven prevaricators; and that people in the intelligence community at the time -- including a Marine general -- believed the Administration was cherry-picking intelligence.

The Shark is by all reports a mensch (the Brawler wouldn't use the world "soulless" to describe him), but his embrace of arguments that are only going to be more threadbare with the passing of time is disappointing.

"Bush Lied" was deja vu all over again

To call “Bush Lied, People Died” a “slander,” one has to make the argument that the Bush Administration coolly analyzed the intelligence concerning the Iraqi threat and let the facts as presented – not their ideological or strategic predilections – drive its decisions. One has to argue that the Administration did not “sex up” intelligence that fit its ends or downplay, or suppress, intelligence that contradicted or undermined its assertions.

 

News reports at the time suggested the administration was looking more for reasons to go to war than looking for facts. And when Hans Blix presented the case that these WMDs you’re talking about – they’re not there, the Administration’s response was “Then they’re somewhere else!”

 

And the assumption that the people involved in the decision making would do so in a fair and balanced manner was always a stretch given that many of them had a track record of prevarication.

 

As members of Ford Administration, Don Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney worked hard to undermine arms reduction efforts with the Soviets. They believed the Soviet threat was greater than the CIA believed (when, in hindsight it was actually considerably weaker than the CIA portrayed). They didn’t have any stellar insight leading them to think the Soviet menace was greater than advertised. It was just a “gut” thing, the same sort of “thinking” that would guide them three decades later.

 

Anyway, tacking right to appeal to the conservative base, Ford made Rumsfeld (previously his chief of staff) his secretary of defense and made Cheney (Rumsfeld’s No. 2) chief of staff.

 

From Richard Rhodes’ Arsenal of Folly (p. 119):

 

 

“Rumsfeld and Cheney were the right wing of the Ford Administration,” writes the journalist Sidney Blumenthal, “opposed to the policy of détente with the Soviet Union, and they operated by stealthy internal maneuver.” Once Rumsfeld became secretary of defense, he attempted to sabotage Kissinger’s SALT II negotiations. An important reason for [CIA director William] Colby’s replacement with the more pliable George H.W. Bush, Blumenthal says, was the CIA’s unwillingness to cooperate with the Rumsfeld-Cheney effort. “Instead of producing intelligence reports simply showing an urgent Soviet military buildup, the CIA issued complex analyses that were filled with qualifications. Its National Intelligence Estimate on the Soviet threat contained numerous caveats, dissents and contradictory opinions. From the conservative point of view the CIA was guilty of groupthink, unwilling to challenge its own premises and hostile to conservative ideas.

 

The pliant George H.W. Bush, under orders from the right-tacking Ford, would subsequently create an outside team to look at the NIE on Soviet Strategic Objectives. Why? Because the assessment wasn’t panicked enough. The so-called Team B included two neocons just making their bones, Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Pipes.

 

Again from

Rhodes:

 

Writing a decade before Vice President Richard Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and their associates in the administration of George W. Bush pushed the CIA to inflate the threat of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, a Nitze (Paul Nitze, another hawk who was on Team B) biographer, David Callahan, identified a similar modus operandi in the Team B episode.

To critics in Congress, the Team B episode was a blatant attempt to undermine the objectivity of intelligence and twist CIA estimates to fit an ideological agenda. Nor did the timing of [George H. W.] Bush’s undertaking – during the last months of the Ford Administration – seem coincidental. Democrats suspected that Team B was aimed at saddling any incoming administration with a preordained, anti-Soviet pessimism. Three congressional committees began investigations into the affair. Summing up the sentiments of many who looked into the matter, Senator Gary Hart would write that “’competitive analysis’ and use of selected outside experts was little more than a camouflage for a political effort to force the National Intelligence Estimate to take a more bleak view of the Soviet Threat.”

 

From a Lawrence Korb piece on the topic.

 

Although the Team B report contained little factual data, it was enthusiastically received by conservative groups such as the Committee on the Present Danger, whose members included Ronald Reagan, and the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. But the report turned out to be grossly inaccurate. For example, it said that the Soviets would have 500 intercontinental Backfire bombers capable of striking the United States by 1984. In reality, only 235 were deployed. Team B also claimed that the Soviets were working on an anti-acoustic submarine, though they failed to find any evidence of one. The hawks explained away this lack of evidence by stating that "the submarine may have already been deployed because it appeared to have evaded detection."[3]

 

 

Maybe the sub was deployed in

Syria

with aluminum tube rockets packed with anthrax?

 

Korb goes on:

 

A similar situation arose with the CIA analysis of the role of the KGB in the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II in 1981. The CIA analysis showed that the attack had been carried out by Turkish fascist extremists and that there was reliable documentation that proved that neither the Soviet Union nor Bulgaria was involved in the plot. Nonetheless, Casey produced a study to the contrary, which reached President Reagan and other senior members of the administration.

In the first Bush administration, the CIA claimed that Soviet spending on weapons started declining in 1988 and that the number of Soviet strategic launchers was staying the same or declining. Then Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney argued publicly that the Soviet Union's efforts to modernize its strategic nuclear weapons were "robust and continuous."

[7]

Moreover, Cheney asserted that there was "absolutely no evidence" that Gorbachev's ascension had altered Soviet strategic planning.

[8]

 

Saying the bumper-sticker charge “Bush Lied, people died” suggests that the people who led our country to war were above twisting evidence to their own ends (which may have been driven by motives pure as the driven snow). But there’s nothing in the backgrounds of Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz to suggest they’re that kind. And, in the buildup to Iraq, the U.S. public was the victim of a con that had been played many times before.

Did everyone get Iraq intelligence wrong?

Everyone got it wrong! That’s one of the key defenses of Bush supporters against critics who contend that Bush misled the country into going into Iraq. (Or in blunter temrs that some call a  “slander,” “Bush lied, people died.”)

 

You can’t blame Bush, or suggest he was acting dishonestly, because he was acting on the best information available. Other intelligence agencies said the same thing. C’est la vie.

 

This argument, however, ignores that the Bush Administration’s claims about Iraq's capacity and capabilities were crumbling as the invasion date approached. The UN investigators weren’t finding any evidence that Saddam was reconstituting a nuclear program.

 

The argument also ignores the fact that many  in the intelligence community – though not those high up in the administration nor in the veep’s or the Pentagon’s so-called intelligence operations – were not finding the evidence that the administration wanted. So it was ignored.

 

 

From Thomas E. Ricks’ “Fiasco”: (pp. 54-55)

 

 

This particular official is more sympathetic than most of his peers to the Bush administration, but still emphatically rejects the administration’s ex post facto defense that everybody got it wrong. The core conclusion of the best intelligence analysts was, he said, that “we were looking for evidence, but we weren’t finding it.” But the failure to stop 9/11 had tarnished the credibility of the intelligence professionals and lessened the deference that one might give them. On top of that, relative amateurs working for Feith and Cheney felt free to seize on existing bits of data and push them as hard as they could, this official added. “The would take individual factoids, build them into long lists, and then think because of the length of the list, it was credible.” When the lists were rejected by intelligence professionals, they would be leaked to friendly journalists. …

Others lower in the intelligence hierarchy are less forgiving of themselves and of the Bush administration. Basically, said Greg Thielmann, the State Department proliferation expert, the administration was looking for evidence to support conclusions it already had reached. “They were convinced that Saddam was developing nuclear weapons, that whe was reconstituting his program, and I’m afraid that’s where they started,” he said. “They were cherry-picking the information that we provided to use whatever pieces of it that fit their overall interpretation. Worse than that, they were dropping qualifiers and distorting some of the information that we provided to make it seem even more alarmist and dangerous than the information that we were giving them.” The impulse to push the conclusions was especially worrisome, he added, because the intelligence community, not wanting to be caught napping, already tends “to overwarn, rather than underwarn.”

“What I saw was that a lot of analysts, of low-level people, had it about right,” said a senior military intelligence official specializing in Middle Eastern affairs who is still involved in this area and so couldn’t speak on the record without endangering his security clearances. But as the intelligence moved up the chain of command rather than have its level of certainty diluted, as is generally the case when information is passed upward, in this case it was treated as more definite. “By the time you get to the executive summary level, it didn’t look a lot like the analysts’ views,” he said. “And by the time you get to the unclassified public portion, all the mushiness and doubts were washed out.”

Feith and his subordinates, especially Bill Luti, a former Navy officer who became a factotum for the administration hawks, “were essentially an extra-governmental organization, because many of their sources of information and much of their work were in the shadows,” said Gregory Newbold, the Marine general who was then the Joint Staff’s operations director. “It was also my sense that they cherry-picked obscure, unconfirmed information to reinforce their own philosophies and ideologies.”

 

 

In case you're wondering,  “It was also my sense that they cherry-picked obscure, unconfirmed information to reinforce their own philosophies and ideologies” is an extraordinary on-the-record statement to come from a Marine general about the behavior of the executive branch. And, to the Brawler's ears, it rhymes with "lie."

 

No, not everyone got it "wrong." The Bush Administration got the intelligence wrong because it wanted -- for motives pure or otherwise -- the end result of wrong intelligence.

 

Is "Bush Lied, People Died" a slander?

Man, does Rick Esenberg hate those "Bush Lied, People Died" bumper stickers.

From Shark and Shepherd:

My second post ("Being serious ...) was prompted by commenters who repeated the slander that "Bush lied and people died." If you believe that, I do think that you are either misinformed or hopelessly partisan; even not serious.

As those familiar with intertron traditions know, nothing is worse than being called "not serious."

But people also know that saying something is a slander doesn't make it so. 

The Brawler supposes that people like Esenberg would make the argument that, "Bush was acting on the best intelligence available. Obviously in hindsight it was the wrong decision. Iraq did not have WMDs But presidents, particularly in wake of 9/11, sometimes must make difficult choices with the information they have, imperfect as it may be."

But the thing is, Bush and other members of his administration made statements to drum up support for war that exaggerated the strength of the intelligence for those claims or in some cases were contradicted by the available intelligence. And, as for the claim, "Well, the CIA said..." It's still not clear to what extent the Bush Administration i.e. Dick Cheney pushed the agency to take a harder line in its assessment of the threat that Iraq presented.

Fred Kaplan on the the mellifluously titled  "Senate Report on Whether Public Statements Regarding Iraq By U.S. Government Officials Were Substantiated By Intelligence Information" :

Some of the officials' claims, the committee concludes, were "substantiated by available intelligence information." This was the case for allegations about Iraq's biological weapons facilities, its ballistic-missile programs, and its support for terrorist groups other than al-Qaida.

In several instances, the claims were backed by the intelligence estimate's majority view but were disputed by some of the agencies. (An NIE is a consensus product, put together by the nation's 16 intelligence agencies; if some of the agencies disagree on some point, they often file a dissenting footnote.) This was the case for the claims that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear-weapons program and that it was building unmanned aerial vehicles for the purpose of dropping biological weapons on Americans and our allies. The Senate report chides the officials for failing, at times willfully, to take these dissents into account.

On a few other issues, officials made claims with great confidence, whereas the intelligence reports expressed considerable uncertainty. This was the case for claims about chemical-weapons production and the prospects of postwar stability.

Finally, several claims had no basis in, or were even contradicted by, the official intelligence reports. These include the claim that Saddam Hussein intended to give weapons of mass destruction to terrorist groups, that he had a partnership with al-Qaida, that he had WMD facilities in deep underground bunkers, and that 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta met with Iraqi intelligence officers in Prague in 2001.

It is worth noting that the claims that reflected U.S. intelligence—on biological weapons, ballistic missiles, and support for non-al-Qaida terrorist groups—were, while serious, not the sorts of threats that would rally a nation to war. Meanwhile, the claims that did galvanize support for the invasion—on nuclear weapons and alliances with al-Qaida—either exaggerated or falsified the intelligence of the day.

For example, page 15 of the Senate report notes that Cheney in September 2002 stated there was "irrefutable evidence" that Iraq had reconstituted nuclear weapons -- a claim supported by some agencies but questioned by others (State, DoE). Page 16 notes that Cheney asserted Iraq could, unless stopped, create a nuke in one to three years (Meet the Press, March 16, 2003). That contradicted findings of the NIE,which said it would take Iraq 5 to 7 years or, in a more unlikely scenario in which it obtained fissile materials, 3 to 5 years.

And of course, Bush would also make statements that went beyond the findings of available intelligence: "And he (Saddam) is moving ever closer to developing a nuclear weapon." (10/7/02). "If the Iraqi regime is able to produce, buy or steal an amount of highly enriched uranium a little larger than a single softball,it could have a nuclear weapon in less than a year." (10/7/02)

One could go on (the Senate report does for 170-plus pages) but you get the picture. The administration made scads of scaremongering statements about Iraq going nuclear to drum up support for the war -- the only way they could drum up support for the war -- and none of these very specific statements were supported by intelligence that possessed remotely the authority the president or his lieutenants suggested (and yes, hanging Cheney's statements on Bush is 100 percent fair given that Bush is the decider).

Now, it's entirely possible that Bush et al deeply and seriously believed that Iraq was an existential threat and they believed that the intelligence they had proved that -- or that future evidence would come to light. (Or that evidence that contradicted their assertions, such as Hans Blix making hash of their certainties weeks before the war, didn't deserve to be taken seriously.) But in making their case to the American people -- who did not necessarily share the decade-old dream of many administration figures in taking down Saddam -- I think that any serious person who looks at the record would have to agree they exaggerated the strength of their case and their information.

A lie is defined by my Webster's II as "a false statement purposely put forward as truth; falsehood;something meant to deceive or give a false impression."

If the slander fits, put it on a bumper sticker.

here we go

Brazzaville in Milwaukee

The dope (do the kids still say that?) band Brazzaville, whose new album (do the kids still say that?) 21st Century Girl is just out from Milwaukee label Bus Stop will be hosting a listening party tonight at 8 at the Sugar Maple in Bay View (411 E. Lincoln).

All the cool kids, who likely don't use the phrase cool kids, will be there. So might the Brawler.

OnMilwaukee has a write up on this and other upcoming MKE Brazzaville events.

(And yes, Sugar Maple is where the hate left gathers for Drinking Liberally.)

Drive By Truckers, the Sands of Iwo Jima and Charlie Sykes

One of the Brawler's favorite bands is the Drive By Truckers, who filter the triple ax attack of southern fried rock through a grinder of mid-80s American punk and marry the sound to sharp, incisive and largely unsentimental tales of life in the south. Their latest album, Brighter than Creation's Dark,broadens the band's vision to include Iraq. They played one of those songs, "The Man I Shot," early during their 3 p,m. July 3 slot at Summer Fest. Based on frontman Patterson Hood's (pictured above) conversations with vets, it makes the point (which won't be made to minors playing an Army video game simulation) that there's a price to be paid for killing people (this and other vids obviously not from Summer Fest).

They also played Puttin' People on the Moon,which takes a look at the people who've been left behind -- and might even feel "bitter" -- in post-Reagan  America.

Mary Alice got cancer just like everybody here
Seems everyone I know is gettin' cancer every year
And we can't afford no insurance, I been 10 years unemployed
So she didn't get no chemo so our lives was destroyed
And nothin' ever changes, the cemetery gets more full
And now over there in Huntsville, even NASA's shut down too

As there's more to life than politics, they also ripped through Carl Perkin's Cadillac, which makes the point that "Mr. Phillips was the only man who Jerry Lee still would call sir."

And, as Patterson Hood is wont to do, he made a long spiel about his great uncle George.George, who grew up in a small town in Alabama. Born in 1920, he saw up close the good and bad of the old South. At Iwo Jima, he saw some unimaginable things. And this fall,he plans to cast his vote for a black man -- something inconceivable when he was a young man. "I don't give a fuck who you plan to vote for but that makes me want to cry," Patterson observed. The band then launched into his uncle's story, The Sands of Iwo Jima. A line from the song had been running through the Brawler's mind earlier that day as he listened to Charlie Sykes' outrage/meltdown over the Army pulling a violent video game in face of protests and pondered the mind of war cheerleaders: "I never saw John Wayne on the sands of Iwo Jima."

It was a fine show -- seeing DBT on a bright summer afternoon may be better than catching them in a dark smokey bar. But the Brawler does feel the band misses guitarist Jason Isbell. Here he is singing Dress Blues.

In other Summerfest as metaphor stories, MIke Plaisted riffs on the multiracial audience at the Earth Wind and Fire show and is mocked by Rick Esenberg (who. let us recall, last year expressed his shock that Roger Waters hates George Bush).

Please, can we stop pretending Glenn Frankovis was busted for using the word "thug"?

Back in 2003, Milwaukee Police Officer Michael Lutz shot and paralyzed a man named Timothy Nabors. People who said they saw it initially said Nabors was unarmed when Lutz shot him. Nabors later admitted he was picking up a gun. Lutz -- who subsequently received  some threats -- took a detective post downtown.

His chief, Glenn Frankovis, in a roll call message, said the decision to transfer Lutz "was made downtown" and that "This transfer should serve as incentive for every police officer who works at District 3 to send a clear and convincing signal to the thugs that the only thing they accomplished was to give us cause to make their lives even more miserable than before."

There was a huge hubbub over this. A fair number of people -- not unreasonably -- saw Frankovis' words as license for officers to go all dirty harry in the Third. Indeed, Hegerty said "The tone of Captain Frankovis' memorandum has undermined our efforts to improve police-community relations and to treat all citizens with dignity, courtesy and respect. The captain's comments were inappropriate and intolerable."

Frankovis was relieved.

This was solid gold for Charlie Sykes et al -- tough cop busted for calling thugs thugs in a PC world! And to this day, denizens of the right get weak in the knees when they hear a politician use the word thug.

But the sqauwkers and their scribe equivalents missed the insubordination for the thugs. After all, Frankovis had used the word "thugs" several times in the past. So his getting busted so severely for that would seem a bit odd, no (unless he was warned against using such language, of course)?

(From the 5/9/01 Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:

"I myself have walked a beat in this area. I know what can be done. I want thugs to be afraid of us."

From the 10/6/02 Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:

"That is not something I'm going to tolerate," Frankovis said. He vowed to try to make the neighborhood "free of intimidation by thugs."

Perhaps Art Jones was more tolerant of thugs talk.)

When Frankovis -- who was an ambitious man -- said the decision to transfer Lutz "was made downtown" it was a less than implicit criticism of the transfer. As watchers of cop shows from Barney Miller to The Wire know, there's a chain of command in the force. And you mess with that chain of command at your own peril. Frankovis was too experienced of a cop to not realize the message he was sending -- this was not my call, it was hers. And that's messing with the chain of command.

Indeed, buried in a December 13, 2003 story was the paragraph: "Hegerty added, however, that "it's not for Captain Frankovis to say" where Lutz should be assigned."

This point was made more explicit in a Nov. 15, 2004 Journal Sentinel story:

Hegerty made two major personnel moves that made news. In December, she reassigned Capt. Glenn Frankovis after a memo was leaked in which he urged his officers to "send a clear and convincing signal to the thugs." It came after Hegerty had transferred an officer who was threatened after he had shot and paralyzed a suspect.

Today, Hegerty said the removal had nothing to do with the word "thugs."

"Read the rest of the memo. It was insubordinate. It challenged my authority to transfer, and it gave tacit approval to heavy- handedness," she said.

Pastor Harold Moore, of Mercy Memorial Baptist Church, liked Frankovis' no-nonsense approach but supported his removal.

"She was letting people know it would not be business as usual," Moore said.

That passage is from a story more than four years old but never dented the narrative (even with a columnist who works at the paper). Possibly because that narrative is too pleasing to too many tellers. (For a thought experiment, imagine how a Chief Frankovis would have dealt with an ambitious captain who was publicly bucking his command?)

Illusory Tenant has more on the thug life.