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.

When the Madison School Board passed its budget this spring, there were none of the furrowed brows, exasperated sighs or economy-sized bottles of anti-depressants you would normally see at a budget hearing. There were only a few members of the public who exercised their right to speak at the board, and most of them were fairly low-key, as there weren’t really any notable programs or services on the chopping block.

Afterward, I spoke briefly with board member Marj Passman, a vivacious retired schoolteacher with a New York accent that flares up when she’s excited or angry. She described the budgeting process as a “dream” made possible by a 13-million dollar multi-year referendum passed overwhelmingly by voters to stave off further cuts on top of the 35-million slashed from the budget in five years. She kept saying it was surreal, and she expected someone to tell her it wasn’t going to be that easy at any moment.

Then last month, the state legislature told Passman and hundreds of school districts statewide, “Nope, it ain’t gonna be that easy.”

Facing an unprecedented 6.6-billion dollar budget shortfall courtesy of a recession that’s ruining everone’s friggin’ decade, state lawmakers carved their spending plan up like a Thanksgiving turkey, looking for the quickest, most painless ways to make the cuts. Doing much of their work behind closed doors so the concerned parties couldn’t get a clear picture of what was in store for them, they opted to cut drastically from what’s known as “shared revenue” funds, basically a big pot of state tax money that gets passed on to counties, cities and school districts to help them foot their bills.

School districts get money from the state in two main chunks — a flat per-student dollar amount, as well as a piece of general shared revenue that’s calculated based in part on the district’s expenditures and tax revenue. When districts got wise to the impending cuts to their already carefully constructed budgets, they were told the per student fee would be cut slightly, and they could expect up to a ten percent cut to their general shared revenue — dire news to be sure. They began to plan for the worst.

And then, when the governor finally signed the budget, they got worse than the worst as the state meted out 15 percent general shared revenue cuts to around 100 districts, according to Madison Superintendent Dan Nerad, marking the second time in as many months many of those districts had the fiscal carpet yanked out from under them.

Nerad presented the Madison school board with a finely-calculated assessment of their financial predicament for the first time at a committee meeting tonight, and he made it apparent why most of his colleagues call him “Doctor Nerad.” Watching him deliver the news was like watching an oncologist give a patient his biopsy results. The district will be losing out on about 3-million dollars in per-student funding, and a colon-socking 9-million in general aid.

The biggest kicker of the evening was learning what prompted the 15 percent cut in general state aid when Madison and so many schools had been told not to expect any worse than 10. It turns out, the paper-pusher who calculated those estimates had been using data that was a year old. Since Madison tried last year to minimize the referendum’s impact on taxpayers by cashing in on several million dollars of TIF money (a complicated process that allowed them to infuse the money into the budget in a one-time deal), both their revenues and expenditures were bumped into a higher Department of Public Instruction bracket for the year, resulting in the aid cut.

With bombshells like that dropping, it’s not surprising the mood in the room tonight was 180-degrees different from last spring’s budgeting session.

“I know and I appreciate that you and (Superintendent) Dan (Nerad) have to be calm and deliberative and patient,” Passman told Assistant Superintendent Erik Kass with a pained grin, “but I’m angry. I’m very angry. Our government has once again helped to destroy education in this state. Our children are going to suffer. They’ve been suffering all along anyway, and I am just plain angry about this… it’s apalling, and coming from a Democratic legislature and a Democratic governor, it’s even more apalling.”

Passman’s outrage is nothing new or alien, as she and many of her colleagues have long been pushing for the state legislature to re-imagine the one-two death punch funding mechanisms of revenue caps and the qualified economic offer. But it was a little shocking to see her turn her guns on the state’s Democrats. Then again, I’d be a little miffed too if somebody handed me the fiscal equivalent of a donkey punch after I’d settled comfortably into a well-planned budget.

As Nerad, Passman, Arlene Silveira, Lucy Mathiak, Johnny Winston Junior, Beth Moss, Ed Hughes and Maya Cole see it, the state government is trying to get away with the biggest case of passing the buck this century. Faced with the unpopular choices of raising taxes or cutting services, lawmakers chose to cut a source of funding that many schools count on, knowing full well there are provisions in state law that allow schools to raise property taxes beyond their revenue caps when a state funding source is cut.

So now it’s up to the schools to be the bad guys. Nerad says his office is working on a plan to dig out of the hole, and with the options of fiscal finagling, furloughs, program cuts and tax increases in front of him, the only thing that isn’t on the table is firing staff. Apparently, while state lawmakers were taking their own sweet time with their budget, the contractual deadline for layoffs in the Madison School District elapsed.

In other words, like most budget plans, it’s sure to piss plenty of people off. So much for Marj Passman’s dream.

One of the more frustrating parts of my job is that my schedule is often at the mercy of politicians and policymakers, and they are NOT notorious for being punctual. Most of the time that’s okay, because I’m not notorious for being punctual either.

As a great man once wrote, and then I bastardized, “A reporter is never late. Nor is he early. Instead, he arrives precisely when he means to.”

However, when a city council debate has stretched on for hours and everybody wants their turn to talk, but nobody’s really saying anything and it’s getting on toward my bed time, I can occasionally get a little peeved. As much as I would sometimes like to, I can’t bail out when the policymakers get long-winded, because then we don’t get the story. And so, I’m stuck.

But I would rather be stuck in a sixteen hour budget hearing than be stood up by my elected officials. Unfortunately, it seems Wisconsin’s state lawmakers have opted to combine both approaches, and it’s more than just an annoyance for reporters. It’s bad for every Wisconsin citizen.

I’ve only been the direct victim of our state legislature’s heel-dragging once this year, and it made me want to pick a legislator at random and punch them in the face. I was assigned to cover a portion of the Joint Finance Committee’s hearings on the budget. The hearing was scheduled to begin at 10:00 in the morning. I figured given the legislature’s record of late, I could show up at 2:00 and catch plenty of action.

I was wrong. The JFC had not yet convened at 2:00. I spent two hours of my afternoon sitting in their chambers waiting for them to get underway before uttering a string of cusswords a nearby lobbyist thought was directed at him and storming out of the capitol.

That hearing didn’t happen on that particular day. It was rescheduled for noon the next day. It finally got underway at 5:30 that evening. I didn’t care. Our news director had decided to rely on secondhand sources for the remainder of our state budget coverage. With only two bodies in the newsroom on afternoons, I think she made the right call too. It certainly wouldn’t have been a good call to halve our news coverage strength and wrack up overtime to cover one story that might not have even happened.

The problem is that if pulling coverage on the state budget proceedings was the right call for our newsroom, it was the right call for a lot of other newsrooms as well.

And the delays in addressing the budget aren’t because State Sen. Fred Risser has gotten turned around wandering in the wrong wing of the capitol. Every minute the start of these meetings is delayed is a minute lawmakers are caucusing, doing the nitty-gritty work of negotiating a budget behind closed doors instead of in open session where the public and their watchdogs can follow along with every step.

How did Wisconsin’s state budget wind up with plans to allow illegal immigrants to get proxy driver’s licenses attached to it? How did a 75-cent monthly fee on cell phone users get the thumbs up, and how did it become okay for oil companies to pass on some of their tax burden to regular folks at the pump? Gosh, I really wish I could tell you, but those decisions were made without public or media oversight in a closed caucus.

That leaves 132 grown-up children unsupervised in a $62.2 billion candy store, and that should be enough to alarm any Wisconsin citizen, politically ambivalent or not.

And if by chance a member of the public had wanted to sound off on a particular budget item, they’d have had to hang around the state capitol for a couple of days straight, waiting for the body to convene at its own leisure. That’s no way to involve the citizenry in government.

There’s a reason lawmakers are required to give the public notice listing exact start times well in advance of any kind of meeting. Wisconsin’s closed caucus system violated the spirit of those laws, and it needs to go.

Several years ago, I may have had a hand in what we’ll call the “creative redecoration” of a handful of signs leading into a small town in Wisconsin. No, this is not that story. I’ve got to wait a little longer to make sure the statute of limitations puts me in the clear on that outrageous little stunt.

However, the next time I’m feeling that mischievous, I’ve got an idea in mind. Wisconsin needs a sign on our southern border, something that makes all the northbound flatlanders on a Friday afternoon shift in their seats and look at each other uncomfortably. Something along the lines of, “Wisconsin: Come for our beer, brats, cheese and football, stay for our serial killers!”

“Live like you mean it” eat your friggin’ heart out!

There have been some creepy bastards that have gone on epic reigns of terror in this state, but everybody knows that Plainfield’s Ed Gein wins the title of “bull goose loony” without a fight. The guy was the inspiration for an Alfred Hitchcock movie, for frig’s sake!

My appreciation of the morbid, the macabre, the absurd and the profoundly irreverent is well-documented, so when I got word that there are some filmmakers from Appleton working on a project called “Ed Gein: The Musical,” I probably got a little more excited that would be considered healthy. The potential for hilarity is almost endless.

But watching the trailer they’ve released with a co-worker, we couldn’t help but squirm. I understand the filmmakers are striving to be “historically accurate,” but without some element of more blatant farce, I can’t see sitting through an entire feature-length presentation of this. It’s just… uncomfortable!

Here’s the trailer. Judge for yourself.

Today, gentle reader, I would like to call your attention to a case study in Wisconsin being the weirdest state in the whole of the Union.

Attached to this blog post, you will find the image of a screen capture I took while doing some research on a story today. It is part of the rather lengthy RAP sheet of one Brian J Britz, which you can find using the state of Wisconsin’s CCAP. Specifically, this screenshot refers to the Milwaukee County case numbered 2000CV009662, which just so happens to be something of a mystery.

Not only does this file list none of the details regarding the charges or sentences that were brought against Mr. Britz in 2000 (rather, this one specific case in 2000…Mr. Britz was in court multiple times in 2000), but it lists as his co-defendent a 1990 Oldsmobile Regal.

Whatever it was Mr. Britz was charged with, his accomplice was a car.

Now it’s not that I don’t find Mr. Britz’s recent exploits interesting. While the original story (link above) credits him with achieving his 10th DUI, there was some speculation later in the day among various sources that it may have been his 11th, or even his 12th, and even in Wisconsin, most people get it figured out by their 5th or 6th.

But to have committed a crime and been aided or abetted by an automobile…that’s something I just don’t see in my usual day-to-day diggings. I must admit this story has captured my imagination and rivetted my curiosity, and I am vowing now to find more answers.

Also, there’s the matter that Oldsmobile never manufactured the Regal line — that was a Buick model. A quick run of the VIN on Carfax returns the car as a 1990 Oldsmobile Regency, another unfortunate line from that same time period. It’s surprising the car was even still running when 2000 rolled around, but I guess it just adds to the enigma.

Until I can get my open records request into the Milwaukee County DA’s office (and wait several months for a reply), however, there’s nothing to stop me or anyone else from wildly, irresponsibly speculating what this absurdity of a CCAP case entry might mean. It certainly opens up a number of questions.

First and foremost, did the Milwaukee County District Attorney’s office seriously charge an inanimate object with a crime, or is this more like something out of Stephen King, where the car was possessed by some kind of evil spirit and went on a killing rampage?

Was the Regency given a jury trial, or did it take a plea deal? What happened to it after its time in court? Was it locked up in a salvage yard until it paid its debt to society? Is it free now? Was it put to death in the smelting chamber?

I think it’s likely from the Regal/Regency discrepency that this case involved some kind of identity fraud on the part of the car, Mr. Britz or both. Perhaps the Regency was an illegal immigrant… rrr, import… and Britz arranged to have it smuggled into the country via Great Lakes container ship, though how he would be clever enough to accomplish that in the midst of racking up ten (or more) DUIs goes beyond my comprehension.

I would certainly be interested in any other theories there might be as to what this is all about, as long as they’re not boring and grounded in fact.