Democrat Louis Molepske, the state Assembly Representative from Stevens Point, gets my “Sconnie of the Week” award today — and deservedly so. It’s these little quirks in Wisconsinites that make the snow, the sleet and the cold all worthwhile.

Molepske’s Sconnie cred was on full display this afternoon when, in an interview with me on some legislation he’s drafting, he referred to a Chicago native as being “from Down South.” It made my day, because I do the same damn thing.

If you’re interested, Molepske is drafting a bill that would create more uniformity between the state’s drunken driving laws and drunken sporting laws. The DUI reform recently signed into law was a good step in tightening down on a flagrant problem, but Molepske wants to close what’s basically a blatant loophole.

If you’re convicted of DUI in Wisconsin, you’re written a traffic ticket — the first time. On second and subsequent offenses, you’ll face mounting misdemeanor and then felony charges, along with growing jail or prison sentences.

However, right now, if you’re caught driving a boat, a snowmobile or an ATV, even if you’re so drunk you can hardly sit upright, it’s just a ticket — every time. Those tickets are not counted against your driving record, they won’t get your driver’s license suspended and they don’t stop anyone from offending again.

Molepske wants to change that. Watch for this bill.

***UPDATED… The city council is postponing their meeting tonight due to the weather, so we will postpone the watch party as well… See latest post for more info***

To rehash — Starting at 6:30, the Edgewater Debate Watch Party will get underway at Amy’s Cafe. Everyone is welcome, and stimulating discussion is encouraged. The bar staff should be expecting us and will have the game… rrr, the meeting on TV, and maybe even some bar specials for us. The snow might slow down some of the people from the outlying regions, but the event will occur as long as the meeting itself happens. If the city council meeting is cancelled, so is the watch party, which makes sense I guess.

I hope to see a good crowd of interested citizenry, and in addition, I expect a few bloggers, pundits, politicians, former alders and media types, so it could be insightful as well as entertaining. Dane101 will certainly be well-represented. Bloggers are encouraged to come armed (with laptops), and provide amusement for members of the city council, as they are providing amusement for us. I do not have the technological capacity to set up a webcam, but if you do, Alder Mark Clear would appreciate it.

I’ll print off a couple sets of Jill Sixpack’s Madison Common Council Bingo cards for interested players, and I’ve also compiled a final list of rules for the Edgewater Debate Drinking Game. I had some help from readers and a certain Cap Times city reporter, but here’s how the game is played:

See you at Amy’s!

If any of the back row regulars at city council meetings had a nickel for every time they’d heard me lament the fact that I didn’t have a drink in hand, they’d have a pile of nickels you could respect the hell out of.

Of course, as storied a history as journalism and alcohol have together, I don’t think I would ever actually cross that line and sneak a flask or a forty into the council chambers. Never mind that it would be incredibly unprofessional, uncouth and the potential grounds for my termination. I was raised in a family where you brought enough for everybody or you didn’t bring any at all. There are a lot of people in that room, and I get the impression quite a few of them are very thirsty.

Nonetheless, I might finally get my chance to watch a city council debate while throwing a few back.

As many of you may know, what is debatably the most controversial, divisive issue to come before the city council this year — the proposed redevelopment of the Edgewater Hotel — will be taken up at next Tuesday’s city council meeting. Basically, if the Mayor isn’t able to get 14 yes votes to overturn a rejection by the Landmarks Commission, the plan, as it stands, is dead in the water. Under pressure from his board of directors and investors, developer Bob Dunn has said in no uncertain terms he will NOT seek to retool the project to appease the commission.

So high noon falls at 6:30 PM on December 8th. Dozens of worked up supporters and detractors of the project will pack the city council chambers to sound off during public hearings. Then, in the first real item on the agenda, the alders will get their turn, and the real fireworks will begin.

But on the night of the Super Bowl of city council debates, I’m going to be sidelined.

We’re in a recession. Our news room was understaffed. Then my buddy Erik left the news room to take a job in the governor’s office, and now we’re uber-understaffed until we hire a replacement. I’m told it’s something they’re working on, but until it gets done, I’m basically chained to an anchor’s desk on daysides.

I gave brief consideration to attending the meeting off the clock, and I haven’t ruled it out. But my mind got to percolating, and I decided I might be more comfortable watching the meeting from a couch or a barstool. Then I got really delusional and got to wondering if there might be anyone else as warped as me.

So I’m inviting fellow engaged citizens, bloggers, media-types, political junkies, policy-makers, masochists and anybody else who isn’t afraid to combine beer, politics and crass humor to the first ever CITY COUNCIL SUPERBOWL WATCH PARTY. Anyone’s welcome, supporter or detractor, as long as we’re agreed the debate will remain in the realm of civil, good-natured ribbing. Just let me know by Monday night if you think you want to come — leave a comment on the blog or shoot me an email.

If the interest is as minimal as I’m expecting, I’ll fire up the grill and host in my living room with a couple cases of beer. If enough people want to spend an evening watching city council debates and talking smack, I know a couple bars I think we could take over without too much trouble.

Of course, what’s a watch party without an associated drinking game? I’m working on the rules for that right now, and need suggestions — again, comment them or email me. I briefly considered making the rule that, “as long as Thuy Pham-Remmele is talking but NOT making sense, chug your drink,” but decided an ambulance visit would really dampen the evening. However, some other potential rules:

1. Any time an indecipherable city planning acronym is mentioned (TIF, RFP, UDC, etc), last person to blurt out what it stands for takes a drink.
2. Any time the mayor yields his seat to the city council president, players must sip from the opposite side of their glass for the duration or take an additional penalty drink.
3. Any time a city staffer is flummoxed by a baffling question, take a drink.
4. If the council takes a recess, players must take a drink for every minute beyond the allotted time the council waits to reconvene.
5. Any time Alder Tim Bruer makes a bad pun, take a drink.
6. Any time Alder Tim Bruer makes a good pun, finish your drink.
7. Any time one of the following terms or phrases is mentioned, take a drink — TIF, height limitation, historic district, right of way, waterfront, visually incompatible, media (more?)
8. Any time one of the following words or phrases is mentioned, finish your drink — hill people, turd spigot, bloggers, (more?)
9. When the final vote happens, supporters of the project buy the opposition drinks if the opposition wins and vice versa. Those who didn’t pick a side sit back and laugh at how worked up everybody else is, then secretly wish someone would buy them a drink.

Again, I need all the suggestions for rules and terms I can get. Email them to me or comment on the blog, and I’ll post a final draft of “Edgewater Debate Drinking Game” rules before Monday morning. Also, express your interest if you’re coming, so I can make arrangements to have a place to view the debate. The watch party starts at 7:00 Tuesday, and I’ll announce a location Monday night.

Did civic engagement ever sound so good?

Speaking of which, this is a big vote, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t urge you to contact your Alder and voice your opinion. I’m in support, so I urge you doubly so if we share that view.

We live in a special state here in Wisconsin.

As with most things, you don’t realize how special it is until you swap it for something else, only to find that something really sucks. For instance, I couldn’t have been much older than 18 when my folks, my sisters and I traveled to Branson, Missouri for a family reunion. We convened on the first night at a fairly impressive Mom and Pop steakhouse where the smell was just about good enough to knock you to the floor.

Salivating, we awaited the waitress’s arrival. Full of (almost) southern hospitality, she dropped napkins, bread baskets and drink menus in front of us, then pulled out a pen to take drink orders. My old man and I were jacked to see that on top of good service, the place offered an impressive tap beer list, including a family favorite from Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin. Pops ordered a Honeyweiss, and I quickly followed suit.

“Can I see some ID,” the waitress asked, raising an eyebrow.

“Oh, right,” Dad chuckled, and he and I quickly dug out our wallets and handed our driver’s licenses to the waitress so she could verify that we were father and son.

Now looking slightly perplexed, the waitress took them both, gave a cursory glance to my Dad’s, and then turned to me and said, “I’m sorry, we can’t serve you. You’re under 21.”

It was our turn to raise eyebrows now, and Dad interjected, “No, didn’t you see my license? He’s my son.”

“But the drinking age is 21,” the waitress responded.

“But I’m his father, and I’m telling you it’s okay,” Dad prodded, waiting for her to get it.

“But he’s not 21,” the waitress reiterated. A couple people at a nearby table turned to see what the commotion was.

“He’s my DAD, lady,” I sighed, getting all thirsty and exasperated.

“I’m going to be drinking with him,” Dad said, his own voice rising a little, “and I’m his father. I’m right here.”

At this point, we might as well have been speaking in Greek, and she could have been blathering in Swahili. The Abbot and Costello routine continued for a while longer before my Great Uncle, a Sconnie transplant in Virginia, politely explained that most states in the Union, Missouri among them, are not as enlightened as Wisconsin when it comes to the law’s take on kids drinking with their parents. Simmering, Dad ordered a beer and I ordered a water.

I haven’t spent a dime of my discretionary tourist’s dollars in the state of Missouri since then, and I’ll be damned if you ever catch me in that hellhole Branson again in my life. The Gateway to the West can cram it with walnuts too, for all I’m concerned.

You see, the right to throw one back with your folks is one of the wonderful little gems you’ll find in Wisconsin’s law books that makes riding out five months of frozen wasteland worth the while. While I didn’t do it often as a minor, and I certainly didn’t do it to excess, I look back on the times I enjoyed an adult beverage with my parents in a bar with a sort of misty-eyed reverence. It was a right of passage, and it certainly meant something every time, whether we were celebrating the close of a show with the local theater guild or toasting an academic accomplishment.

It’s an experience I hope to share with my kids decades from now, if the world is unfortunate enough to be cursed with my progeny.

But apparently State Senator Judy Robson never enjoyed any of those magic moments with her three children, because she’s proposed kneecapping Wisconsin’s drink-with-your-parents tradition, cutting it off for anyone under the age of 18. Frankly, the entire notion is ridiculous, because the drinking age should be 18 anyway, but that’s a fight for another day.

The neo-prohibitionists who are slowly gaining clout in Madison and in Wisconsin argue that children drinking with their parents gives kids the impression that drinking is a socially acceptable behavior. Well, it has been going on in our society for several millenia now.  What they fail to grasp is that children drinking responsibly with their parents gives kids the impression that drinking responsibly is a socially acceptable behavior, and that’s a good thing.

I come from a family of drinkers. We bat 1.000. Everyone drinks. On my dad’s side of the family, the preferred poison is scotch. On mom’s side, it’s gin. There’s a wide, deep-seated appreciation of various beers and wines on both sides of the family.

One of the memories I cherish most is sitting around after Christmas dinner with my Mom’s family, passing and pulling from a bottle of champagne and saying one thing we were looking forward to about the next year. At the end of the night, we all signed the bottle. I hope someone still has it somewhere.

I come from a family of drinkers, but there’s not a problem alcoholic in the bunch. No DUIs, no stints with AA, and no one inclined to swinging fists on a bender. We bat 1.000, because we learned to drink from the family, and we had sterling examples to follow. From an early age, before I grasped what alcohol was, I knew it wasn’t acceptable to drink and drive a car, it wasn’t okay to depend on alcohol and violence was an off-limits issue altogether.

That there are people who would try to take that learning and bonding experience away from my family is baffling.

Now granted, every family is different. Problem drinkers have kids too, but the notion that they’re pouring Jack down their kids’ throats is utterly ridiculous. There’s a term for that — it’s child abuse. And I’m willing to stake a lot that says the vast majority of parents don’t use Wisconsin’s unique laws to get their kids puking, or even stumbling, drunk. Changing the law would punish 99 percent of families for the actions of the lunatic fringe.

After all, a Wisconsin family withheld medical treatment from their dying daughter on religious grounds, but there’s no law that says parents can’t attempt to impart a faith upon their children. There are children who do irreparable damage to their bodies eating nothing but fast food and fatty snacks seven days a week, but there’s no law mandating parents feed their children five to nine servings of fruit and veggies a day.

Instead, there are laws for dealing with abusive or neglectful or insane parents, and it’s a damn good thing that they’re there. But it’ll be a cold day in hell when the government knows a damn sight more than most parents about raising their kids. I’ve seen how career politicians’ kids turn out. They don’t do any better than the rest of us.

So I’m hoping Senator Robson and her colleagues decide to abandon their regressive tack on the “issue” of children drinking with their parents at bars and decide to focus their efforts on something that actually poses a danger to Wisconsin… You know, like how we’re still the leading state in the nation when it comes to drunk driving?

I’ll leave you to ponder that… with this Weis family bonding moment: game day beer pong with three generations of Weis. That’s my sister and I versus our father and grandfather. Eat your heart out, Judy Robson.

There was a little while this morning when I thought I’d finally get an “Oh, the HUMANITY” moment in my broadcasting career.

Then I found out the beer truck that overturned on Highway 151 north of the I-90 interchange, shattering its 22-ton cargo of glass bottles and flooding the side of the highway, was filled with lime-flavored intoxicants, and I was able to breathe a sigh of relief. Nothing of value was lost.

Here are the pictures taken at the scene by the Madison Fire Department. Fire spokeswoman Lori Wirth forwarded them to me. She tells me you could smell the lime-scented essence of barley and hops for miles. Since these pictures were taken, the truck trailer has apparently split open as they tried to tow it. One can imagine the deluge of beer and broken glass is quite a bit more evident.

I think the first is the best because of the big, goofy grin on the guy who’s walking away from the “carnage.”

You know what they say… No use crying over spilt beer.