The public is paranoid enough that their elected officials are all dishonest and looking to line their own pockets so when one of them is proven to be as bad as the public believes, the full power of the law ought to come down on them.

That appears to be what’s about to happen to Milwaukee County Supervisor Toni Clark. Clark is expected to accept a plea deal and plead guilty to falsifying campaign finance documents which is a felony. Convicted felons are not allowed to hold public office which means that as soon as her conviction becomes official, her representation of her district ends.

Clark came onto the political landscape a few years ago by bashing then-County Supervisor Robert Krug. Krug, who had served as a hard-working full-time Supervisor, had represented the far north side district for years but Clark promised change and had implied that Krug didn’t do enough while serving as Supervisor. After taking office, Clark decided to only serve part-time while taking the full-time salary, meaning the district which had in the past had many projects and strong representation, now had no one to lobby on their behalf.

Clark did show up for required meetings, but developed a reputation among her peers for doing little more than the minimum — something many of her constituents were left unaware of. One thing that Clark did however, was to hold a fundraiser and rather than use it for her campaign, she pocketed the cash. Nothing was raised for her she claimed, but donors to her campaign cried foul when they discovered that the money they had given to her went into her personal bank account.

So is Clark a loss for her district? Certainly not. If anything, her constituents will once again have an opportunity to elect a new County Supervisor. Let’s hope that this time they make a better choice.

Mayor Tom Barrettt has just launched his new campaign website and it shows promise that it will offer much more than the sound bites that his opponents are offering.

This promises to be a difficult race where Barrett’s biggest challenge is to respond to the simple republican slogan “cut taxes”. Barrett has shown amazing fiscal responsibility while serving as Mayor of Milwaukee and has even managed to fully fund the city’s pension fund while other governments have borrowed heavily to run day-to-day expenses. While states like California have found themselves mortgaged to the hilt due to their excessive borrowing. Barrett makes it clear in his video that he believes in the pay-as-you-go method that families across Wisconsin have to live by.

Simply pulling out the credit card every time there is a bill shouldn’t be an option and under Barrett, the City of Milwaukee has remained financially strong without massive increases in taxes.

The show The West Wing put the fictional President Jed Bartlett in the same position that Mayor Barrett is in now. Bartlett was faced with complex issues but an opponent who offered little more than a simple two word slogan to answer everything. In a debate, Bartlett faced an opponent who had the same “cut taxes” rhetoric that Barrett’s opponents have but Bartlett responded by asking another two word answer — what’s next?

What’s next.

Boiling down the running of an entire level of government to a trite “cut taxes” slogan needs to answered by Barrett in much the same way that Bartlett answered. “What’s next”?

Should Barrett end up running against Milwaukee County Executive Scott Walker if Walker wins the nomination, he will be well positioned to ask that question. Why? Because Walker has already shown what’s next by his actions. By borrowing money to operate the Milwaukee County, County Executive Walker has greatly increased the County’s debt load while the county pension debt has grown since Walker has taken over. Unlike Barrett who also faced mounting problems with pension investments adversely affected by the stock market, Walker has chosen the path of Nero — fiddling as Rome burned.

Should Barrett win, he will leave a City that is financially solvent and move into a job where he will face many challenges. But, unlike his opponent, Barrett will be entering office with a proven track record of success and a legacy of fiscal responsibility.

I haven’t been around the doghouse for awhile (due to Real Life), so I thought I’d drop by to say that I’m alive, and to encourage you to look for my appearances as a returning Community Columnist at the Journal Sentinel. My first one, talking about corporate political donations, can be found here. If you have any comments on the column (as opposed to this actual post), I’d appreciate your leaving them there.

I will try to make more frequent appearances here in the future.

Scott Walker announced that former Florida Governor Jeb Bush will be headlining a fundraiser for him. If Walker was looking for someone who had his fiscal style he picked the wrong Guv.

California’s Arnold Schwartzenegger would be a more appropriate match for Walker’s fiscal style. Schwartzenegger has borrowed heavily rather than raise taxes today. This has resulted in yet another fiscal mess coming from California. The borrow and spend tactic only lasts so long as California is sending out IOU’s instead of checks. With the way that Walker following the Schwatzenegger lead at the County level, it’s obvious that Walker cares more about the power and the rhetoric than the fiscal well being of residents of his own state.

It’s been about 35 years since George gave me that shovel. It was a great shovel.

My neighbor at the the time was well into his 80’s. His health had started to fail him but I could tell he had always been an independent and hard-working kind of guy. He would fix things around his house and in his yard and I had always admired how he did things. He would putter around in the yard in the summer and always used his small push mower to cut his grass. All of us had them in our little southside neighborhood back then — mowers that would spin and cut the grass only when you pushed them. I don’t know that most kids today would even recognize what it was, let alone how to use it.

I woke up early, as I suppose most kids do who have an 8pm bedtime. By 6am I was wide awake.

We lived on a corner lot back in those days so when it snowed, we had about twice as much work as many of our neighbors. Nobody had snowblowers back then. You just had to dig out. That was just the way it was.

One of my chores was to shovel the snow. I would get dressed and start the task. I’d start by the stairs, shovel the sidewalk along the side of the house, and finish by continuing across the front. If it was early enough, and I still had time before school, I would continue to shovel the next house. That was George’s house. I’d shovel the front, then I’d just continue along the side of his house and even the short little back walk in his back yard that led to his garage.

George didn’t know.

I kept this up for months. I figured that he would appreciate it but I didn’t really want him knowing who had taken an interest in helping him out. Leave a little mystery in it, I thought, even at my young age. After all, it was only a year or two earlier that I’d discovered that Santa Claus wasn’t real. Young optimism and maybe a sprinkling of the magic of the holidays wasn’t lost on me.

One day I decided to use one of George’s shovels to finish the job. My parents had always bought the flat bladed shovels that were about as wide as they were tall. George had the scoop type shovels, long and thin with a nice curve to push the snow instead of simply digging and tossing as my shovel had been designed to do. They were beautiful shovels. Solid steel, well coated with a layer of brown rust. They were heavy and George had put a nice hand grip on the end of each one. The handle was as tall as I was and when I used it I could feel the bottom scraping the pavement clean. Those were great shovels.

Now I didn’t think George would mind too much if I used his shovels on his sidewalks, and more importantly, I figured he would never find out who his benefactor was. Before George was even awake, I thought, I would be finished with the shoveling and back in my house drinking some hot chocolate.

Well that’s not exactly how it worked. Our neighborhood was a series of polish flats, as we called them back then. There were some bungalos and a few small duplexes thrown in, but they were all close. The lots were maybe 40 feet across. When I shoveled the sidewalk along the side of George’s house, he may have been sleeping 8 feet up and just on the other side of the wall for all I knew.

One day, part of the way through the winter, George surprised me by coming out.

I was busted. The gig was up. For some reason, I thought to myself, I hope he’s not mad. I know it sounds silly, but I was 10 years old and on his property and it wasn’t even yet 7am.

George came up to me and pressed a quarter or two into my mittened hand. “So you’re the one who’s doing this. Thanks. Good job”.

Whew. He wasn’t mad. There I was, with his shovel in my hand, albeit shoveling his walkway, and he was thanking me. This didn’t work out half bad I thought to myself.

George showed me the way he liked his snow shoveled. He liked the edges to be tapered back. He showed me with his shovel how he would end at the end of the concrete and lift, continuing to push the shovel toward the outside as he threw it. George’s sidewalk looked like a perfect luge when he was done.

It was a work of art I thought to myself.

And then George did something I didn’t expect, couldn’t even hope for. George told me to keep the shovel. This wasn’t your ordinary shovel I remember thinking. This was a great shovel.

George didn’t realize it then, but he made an impression on that young boy that would last a lifetime. Every time I go into the garage and see that shovel, I remember my neighbor George. Every time I have used that shovel I think about George’s how-to lesson on shoveling.

While many years have passed and most of my snow removal duties around the house these days consist of using a snow blower, every once in a while, when the snow is high, I find myself pulling out the old shovel to sculpt the perfect tapered edges.

Russ Feingold is used to being called a maverick, but nothing can be more outrageous than syndicated Republican talk show host Rush Limbaugh’s comparison of him to the terrorist, Osama Bin Laden.

Limbaugh said that Bin Laden’s recent comments “sounds like this could easily be [said by] Russ Feingold, the Senator from Wisconsin.”

Limbaugh clearly doesn’t understand the differences between Wisconsin’s squeaky clean maverick senator and a cave dwelling, mass-murdering terrorist. But it’s not the first time that Limbaugh has used inflammatory rhetoric to incite his audience and it won’t be the last.