After studying the warranty and some augury involving small animals, the Policy Werkes concludes that your humble bloggeur will never be as virtuous as the average Madison alderoid.
For the Madison Common Council and its mayor for life, every day is Christmas. It is always better to give because they rarely receive.
We have recounted how Madison shoveled $400,000 to “study” the police, thereby jettisoning any chance of getting more of these problematic cops on the federal government’s charge card. So let’s turn to the latest outbreak of misguided compassion: the Emerald City’s crusade to bridge “the digital divide.”
Some may vow to Make America Great Again. Madison has loftier goals. One way to combat the inherent white privilege that lurks just beneath the surface of every guilty liberal like a cold sore virus is to Make Madison More Digitally Inclusive.
Bring high-speed internet to low-income neighborhoods and it’s all candy and nuts in Santa’s workshop.
“The digital divide is a serious issue in our society,” declares city chief information officer Paul Kronberger, as quoted in the excellent reportage of Dean Mosiman for the Wisconsin State Journal. So many serious issues, so little taxpayer money. Who knew?
“Access to internet needs to be a basic right …,” Ald. Mo Cheeks chimed in. Sigh. So many rights, so few responsibilities.
So Madison’s dudly do-rights descended upon crime-ridden neighborhoods like Allied Drive, Darbo-Worthington, Brentwood and Kennedy Heights. If these neighborhoods could surf the web and download entire gaming files in an instant, maybe they’d stop shooting each other.
After two years and spending more than $500,000, the Emerald City brought a grand total of 19 families into the digital daylight. Nineteen.
Because, you see, recipients were asked to make a nominal payment of $9.99 a month for unlimited data and data speed of at least 25 MBps — plus call center, 24-hour support, infrastructure maintenance and network monitoring.
Nineteen. The effort, commented the chairman of something called the Digital Technology Committee “seems to have failed in some sense …, ” according to Abigail Becker’s reporting in The Capital Times.
Not that the Emerald City is giving up. No price is too great to pay to Command/Delete the digital divide at 25 megabits per second.
Well, maybe.
The half a million spent so far is only a down payment, a pilot project to a larger program called “Fiber to the Premises” that, we are told, could cost $200 million in public and private investment. Two Hundred Million Dollars.
And Madison is nickel and diming for more police.
8 responses to “Can’t we all just bridge the digital divide?”
“The effort, commented the chairman of something called the Digital Technology Committee ‘seems to have failed in some sense …, ‘ ”
Ya think?
Not according to the “Accountability For Thee, But Not For Me!” Lefty Mantra “If Just One [fill in the blank] Can Be Saved” of visible (if microscopically infinitesimal) benefits balanced against invisible (if obscenely exorbitant) OPM (Other People’s Money)
Madison Lefties like the talented @old baldy will see this a smashing, if as yet unrealized, success.
Why unrealized? We just haven’t thrown enough money at it…yet.
The Gotch
What’s the problem, Dave? An expensive, feel-good boondoggle that actually affected 19 people? A roaring success by liberal standards. More evidence–if any were needed–that it’s impossible to parody liberals. They’ve already beaten you to the punch. Studying the police, bridging the digital divide, naming something-anything–after Obama–just another chapter in the endless cycle of virtue-signaling by Madison’s liberal elites paid for by the rest of us. However, the person who deserves the oscar for virtue-signaling goes not to a member of the Madison City Council or the Dane County Board (Surprise!) but to the mayor of New Brighton, Minnesota (you know Minnesota, the liberal nirvana Wisconsin could become if only we’d ditch Scott Walker), who went into a tearful meltdown when a member of the city council dared to question the most sacred of leftist shibboleths, “white privilege.” Watch the hilarity on YouTube, then ask yourself how many of Madison’s civic “leaders” would react in exactly the same way under similar circumstances.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TyBiqGUmNjA
~ 2:40 “…you’re not feeling the ‘White Privilege’ THING.” (bold/cap mine)
“Thing?” BBBWWWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!!!!.
Sorry Gary, I’m not feeling the ”Thing” either; you?
Where does one get ”it,” if I order “it” online today, will it get here by Christmas?
Pathetic moron; if she thinks that’s bad, let’s send her Brandi Grayson.
The Gotch
If the burden of being white in Minnesota gets to be too much for the mayor, she can always move to Madison, where no one in city government would dare question the veracity of white privilege.
This Just In: “Move over ‘white privilege’ — now there’s ‘centrist privilege’ ”
http://www.thecollegefix.com/post/40094/
“Against stupidity, the gods themselves contend in vain.” Friedrich von Schiller
The Gotch
You forgot to mention that they started at Kennedy Heights. That all 8 buildings are owned by one person who claimed that he signed an exclusive contract with another provider and would not give them access to the properties. ( unlawful to deny renters freedom of choice???). Thus the set back and only 19 customers. Maybe you should raise your cherry-picker higher so you can see over the wall around Slumly Manor.
[…] Stately Manor went up 6.2% for Madison schools, 7.6% for MATC, 8.3% for the City of Madison (“bridge that digital divide“), and 12.0% for Dane County — and that doesn’t count the wheel tax)! Overall, the […]
[…] On the other hand, only Paul Soglin is making Madison more digitally inclusive. […]