Wish List 2008

And 2007 comes to an end. Neither with a bang, nor with a whimper, but rather…a bang waiting to happen. Seems that way, anyway. Powder’s dry, and it’ll go off soon.

With another year officially in the books, it’s time for pundits to predict. So here we go: my second annual wish list. Wish List: 2008.

Here’s hoping I do better than Wish List: 2007.

On the up side, as I predicted last year, the sun did shine. Snow did (and continues to) fall. Kids got owies, and I spent more time on my computer than working in my yard. On that much, at least, I was right.

I got my wish with the Packers – Favre came back for one more year, broke a bunch of records, and the Packers will host a playoff game. And President Bush didn’t make a tax-increase deal on Social Security reform.

Of course, we didn’t get the reform, either.

On the down side, that’s about all I got right last year. On to 2008!

Son #1 will bag his first deer. It’ll be a nice big buck, but not as big as mine.

Brett Favre will play another year. All the better to pad those record books and take one more shot at the Superbowl. Bonus record-padding prediction: the Packers will become the first NFL team to throw the ball on over 90% of their offensive plays. Bonus multi-year prediction: Favre will break the NFL record for fumbles in 2011. He’ll do this while playing against Carolina, where Aaron Rodgers has been the starting QB the past two seasons.

Oh, and maybe we could beat the Bears in 2008. At least once.

The Brewers will win the World Series almost by default, after half the league’s players make like Shrinky-Dinks in the post-steroid era.

Conservatives win in April. Supreme Court Justice Louis Butler will lose his re-election bid. Massive spending by interested groups on both sides will fuel demands for campaign finance reform, which will never actually happen due to the Founding Fathers’ annoying insistence that the government not regulate speech.

Also, Scott Walker will win re-election as Milwaukee County Executive following a highly amusing campaign, and will start getting ready for the 2010 gubernatorial campaign.

November changes very little. Democrats will still control Congress, but their ineptitude and a quieter Iraq will prevent a repeat of 2006. In Madison, Democrats and Republicans will hold onto their existing majorities.

Either a Republican or a Clinton will win the White House. Believe it or not, if it’s gotta be a Democrat, Hillary is the best-case scenario.

If Wisconsin’s primary is meaningless, they’ll all have been meaningless, and we’ll be headed for a convention-brokered nomination.

And if that happens, there might be new, formerly un-thrown hats in the ring.

This possibility notwithstanding, I will make up my mind on which Republican candidate to support before Wisconsin’s primary on February 17.

In state politics, Doyle and the Democrats will not openly fight each other as I hoped they might in 2007, but they won’t exactly be all hugs and pajama parties, either.

Senate Democrats will advance their uber-regulatory agenda: the so-called Healthy Wisconsin, taxes on hospitals, greater demands on business, restrictions on political speech.

Thanks to the Republican-controlled Assembly, none of this will make it into law. Governor Doyle will take the opportunity to triangulate between the two houses, thus positioning himself for a re-election bid in 2010.

Back home, I figure this to be the year I finally land a dead-tree byline. I do so by becoming better organized and more persistent. We will not finish our house project in 2008, as the nature of house projects is to always realize there’s still one more thing to do.

The wife and I will go out dancing exactly twice. Son #2 will add several Cub Scout awards to his shirt. Son #3 will learn to play “Mary Had a Little Lamb” on the accordion. The Daughter will be cast as an extra in Johnny Depp’s new Dillinger movie.

All four kids will learn to pick up after themselves without being nagged (it’ll come true eventually!).

And, while I’m delving that deeply into fantasyland:

Um…on second thought, I can’t think of anything any deeper in fantasyland than that.

Happy New Year!

Merry Christmas!

Beer in the fridge, turkey in the oven (and in my stomach), kids recovering from the annual sensory overload and three feet of wrapping paper covering my living room floor.

In fact, the paper's so deep we think my wife's grandmother is buried in here someplace. We can hear her, but danged if we know where she's at. We've been throwing peanuts randomly around the room just to make sure she's got something to eat.

She's lucky there's no football on, or we probably wouldn't even be doing that.

Why the UN Should Move to Wisconsin

The world is a little bit warmer today, thanks to the United Nations and their 2007 Climate Change Conference.

The conference brought together something like 10,000 people – delegates, aides, various followers and hangers-on – from nearly 200 nations. Like locusts (another natural but non-man-made disaster), they descended on Bali, Indonesia, to discuss global climate change and, most importantly, what the United States should be doing about it.

Much of the world was holding its collective breath. Not for whatever decisions came out of the conference, of course, but to keep from exhaling, and sending even more CO2 into the atmosphere.

Somebody had to offset the conferees, after all.

The U.N. estimates 47,000 tons of carbon dioxide and other pollutants will be pumped into the atmosphere during the 12-day conference in Bali, mostly from plane flights but also from waste and electricity used by hotel air conditioners.

If correct, Goodall said, that is equivalent to what a Western city of 1.5 million people, such as Marseilles, France, would emit in a day.

But he believes the real figure will be twice that, more like 100,000 tons, close to what the African country of Chad churns out in a year.

They had so many private jets that they ran out of room at the airport. Not only were they cranking the air conditioning, they were using the worst possible refrigerants.

Way to go, United Nations! Please take control of the internet now, too!

The conferees have been roundly mocked for the immense amounts of pollution they produced while debating how best to force the United States to cut down on pollution. And, as such efforts go, this one was…average. Nothing, other than some back slapping and high-fiving (and swimming and sunning and shopping), got done.

I don’t mean to be too snarky. Agree or disagree, a lot of people think climate change is an urgent subject. They’ll want to get together, someplace, to discuss it.

One does wonder why they can’t just do that in New York, where the UN already has buildings and facilities and conference tables. Why fly thousands of people thousands of miles to a vacation paradise?

Oh. Right. Vacation paradise.

Whatever. In the coming years, we’ll find out just how serious they all are. Technology is going to let us – in fact, already does let us – not just videoconference, but cyberconference. Everybody can be spread across the globe, and still be in the same room.

On the other hand, there’s nothing like the face-to-face meeting for getting things done.

So allow me to suggest one change: next time, instead of a faraway tropical paradise, hold the conference in Wisconsin.

In November.

Here’s why. Remember that story from a few months ago, about Scandinavian moose being bad for the environment?

Norway is concerned that its national animal, the moose, is harming the climate by emitting an estimated 2,100 kilos of carbon dioxide a year through its belching and farting.

That's "equivalent to the CO2 output resulting from a 13,000 kilometer car journey," according to the article.

We may not be able to exactly quantify this (there’s no study, as far as I know), but surely whitetail deer have a similar, albeit smaller, effect. They…um…emit, too, right?

By weight, one Scandinavian moose is roughly equal to 5 whitetail deer. Just for simplicity, let’s also assume a moose-to-deer emissions ratio of 1:5.

Get all those conferees to Wisconsin. Put them in blaze orange, and then into tree stands. If only half of them bag a deer, we’ll have knocked out over 2 million kilos – about 2,100 metric tons – of CO2 that would’ve otherwise been spewed into our atmosphere.

Now that’s an offset. Plus, the conferees didn’t have to travel so far, and nobody needs air conditioning in Wisconsin in November. More problems solved.

And hey, if they don’t want the meat themselves, we have plenty of food pantries. Or, if they insist, we can freeze it or smoke it or dehydrate it and send it to the poor nation of their choice!

Everybody wins!

Hey, UN, I’m available for consulting at very reasonable rates.

Except, yeah, this probably goes against UN policies on firearms. That’s a lot more important than working on climate change.

That, and taking an impromptu vacation in Bali.

The Incredible Shrinking Impeachment Caucus

Tammy Baldwin wants to impeach Dick Cheney.

And, no, it’s not because he shot that lawyer.

Last month, the House of Representatives sent a resolution of impeachment to the Judiciary Committee. Now, three of that committee’s Democrat members – including Wisconsin’s own Rep. Tammy Baldwin – are publicly calling for the hearings to begin.

This is funny, for a couple of reasons. First, because congressional Democrats never wanted to act on the resolution. Never even wanted to see it. It took a procedural motion by its author, Rep. Dennis Kucinich, the ultra-leftist fringe Presidential candidate from Ohio, even to get the resolution to the floor.

Once there, a Democrat – Majority Leader Steny Hoyer – moved to send it immediately and irrevocably to legislative purgatory. He moved to table.

Had that succeeded, the resolution would have been gone, never to be seen again. But it didn’t succeed, because more Republicans than Democrats voted against tabling.

That’s right. Republicans voted en masse not to quickly and quietly dispose of a resolution to impeach the Republican Veep. And why? To make the Democrats talk about it more.

Two hours later, having unsuccessfully tried standing on a stool and swinging a broom and squealing like frightened five-year-olds, Democrats again moved to get the resolution the heck away from them by sending it to the Judiciary Committee.

That one passed, and their nightmare was finally over.

Until now.

That’s why it was funny then. It’s still funny now, because Rep. John Conyers, another liberal Democrat, chairs the Judiciary Committee. Last session, Conyers was all in favor of impeachment, even authoring a resolution to explore that option.

This session, well, he’s found his waffle button.

And now here come three of his own committee members, fellow Democrats, pressuring him to hold impeachment hearings which couldn’t possibly begin until the V.P. has less than a year remaining in office, anyway.

Tammy Baldwin, of course, has liberal Madison and union Janesville as her constituent base. She’s won her last three elections handily. Her partners are in similar boats: Bob Wexler, from Florida, has never polled lower than 65%, and Luis Gutierrez represents a highly gerrymandered part of Chicago – a district in which President Bush managed only 21% in 2004.

These are safe seats. Safe, liberal seats where trying to impeach Darth Dick is akin to leading the final heroic attack on the Death Star (except without the firearms, naturally, and without the violence and the obviously phallocentric X-wing fighters that only serve to rub in our faces the complete lack of any female pilots out there. Seriously, could George Lucas be more blatant with his sexism?).

Of course, Conyers, Hoyer, and Speaker Nancy Pelosi also come from safe, liberal, Democrat seats, and they’re the ones trying to kill the impeachment resolution.

Why? Why, especially, considering that Baldwin et al claim: “…70 percent of voters say that Vice President Cheney has abused his powers and 43 percent say that he should be removed from office right now.”

If that’s the case, Democrats should be falling all over themselves to impeach. The hearings should’ve started already.

It wouldn’t be the first time Democrats played opportunism with the war. Mainstream Democrats from Bill Clinton to Al Gore (and everyone in between!) spent years openly accusing Saddam Hussein’s Iraq of having, hiding, and using WMD.

Then, when casualties were mounting and public opinion was shrinking and Republicans were still in control, Democrats decided Saddam was really OK.

When it was politically convenient, they supported action. When it was politically convenient, they supported withdrawal. When it was convenient, they supported impeachment. Now that maybe it’s a little more complicated, they wish it would go away.

Or…just to stretch my wishful thinking a little bit: maybe now that Democrats are in power, now that they’re partly responsible for what our country does, maybe now they’re acting a little more like grown-ups. Taking their role in the world more seriously. Realizing that blind partisan manipulation and flip-flopping isn’t the way to run a dangerous world.

Just like we all hoped they would, in late 2006.

Yeah, I doubt it, too, but it would explain this impeachment flap.

And, if it is true, what’s that say about Baldwin?

We Won't Tell You, But We Want More Money

The headline was both obvious and vague. “Wisconsin Children Deserve More,” it boldly said.

More what? Money, obviously.

Maybe they could’ve just said so.

That headline – ambiguity and all – prefaced a column by Rose Jones, president of the Wisconsin Alliance for Excellent Schools. Throughout her column (your standard woe-be-the-public-schools pronouncement), Ms. Jones never says “we need more money.”

Like the headline, that is her obvious meaning, but she never comes out and says it. Nor will she. They – advocates of public schools – never do.

The closest she would come: “…in recent years, the funding for K-12 education has fallen behind the actual cost of operating effective schools.”

Well, the cure for that is to spend more. But she chooses – like her side always chooses – to not say so.

Funny.

Instead, Ms. Jones is promoting Senate Joint Resolution 27, a do-nothing bill-to-require-a-bill declaring that “a new school finance system should be in place beginning on July 1, 2009.”

The resolution also makes no attempt to define that new system. It simply calls for it. Because we care.

The resolution does not call for “more money.”

Weird, isn’t it? They need more money, or they think they do. That much is clear. And yet, they don’t say so. They don’t tell us: we need 5% more, or 10% more. Another thousand per kid. They won’t just come out and ask for it.

They won’t say to the state: we’re a higher priority. Spend more on us. Cut somewhere else – corrections, or transportation. Medicaid and BadgerCare. Lay off some state workers.

They won’t say to the taxpayers: you’ll just have to pay higher taxes, because we need more money.

Those are their choices. Higher taxes, or cuts in other state programs. Or a combination of both.

Could they have something else in mind?

Wisconsin’s schools have two basic sources of income: local property taxes and state aid (income taxes, etc.). Those two sources made up 94% of all school funding in 2006.

In a nutshell: each school district figures out how much money they can spend, based on the size of their student body. The state then adds all that up and calculates how much their share is. This year, it’s about $5.9 billion.

The state distributes that money among all the districts, but doesn’t do so evenly: high-property-value districts get less, since they can raise more local money at lower tax rates.

For example: Wisconsin Dells, Pewaukee, and Mequon-Thiensville – all high-value districts – receive less than 30% of their funding from the state. Ashland, Milwaukee, and Beloit all receive more than 80% from the state. Most of the rest comes from local taxpayers.

We could, if we wanted, give even less state aid to those high-value districts, and send it instead to the low-value districts. The low-value districts get more money, therefore, and the high-value districts can raise their property taxes to make up the difference.

Oh, but wait: that’s a tax increase. More money, overall, spent on public schools.

But nobody said they wanted more money. Just a new system.

Bottom line: there’s no way to do what the edustablishment wants without spending more. That is what Ms. Jones and her friends want: more money.

They just won’t openly say so, and they won’t for two reasons.

One, we’re already spending money. Lots of money. Huge, McDuck-like vaults full of money. Well over $11,000 per student. Nearly $6 billion of state income and sales taxes; nearly $4 billion in property taxes. Very nearly one-half of all taxes collected in Wisconsin.

Even if you do need more, convincing the people who are already giving you so much is no easy task.

And two, they can already have more money, if they’re willing to ask for it. If their taxpayers will let them. If they pass a referendum.

That’s the “out” built into the system: you can spend up to this much, but after that, you have to ask. If your voters say yes, you can spend more. If they say no, well, you’ll have to do with what you’ve got.

So. They don’t just want more money. They want more money without having to ask for it, first.

But they won’t say that, either.

Is hunting in danger?

It was early Sunday morning. I laid in ambush, murder in my eyes, waiting for the innocent victim to cross my path.

It did. I struck, then gleefully raised the formerly magnificent creature’s lifeless head in the air, bellowing my war cry and touchdown-dancing around the carcass.

Okay, so I didn’t do that. The gleeful raising and dancing part, that is. I did bag a whitetail deer early Sunday, which now occupies a substantial portion of my chest freezer downstairs.

But Capital Times columnist Joel McNally sees…well, this:

Is it just my imagination or is the outpouring of gushing boosterism over the Wisconsin deer hunt tinged with a little more desperation than usual this year?

For years, I've been one of the few columnists to present an alternative view as the glories of the hunt are extolled by every newspaper in the state with full-frontal pictures of middle-aged men proudly holding up the lifeless heads of formerly magnificent creatures.

Here’s the best part:

It's true some dying little towns up north and some of the working girls who live there may get a little economic bump every year from hunting parties.

Nice.

I’ve said before: Joel McNally is a jerk. He. Is. Odious. Seldom can you find such snark; such thick, sarcastic derision; such complete loathing of an entire tradition and the people who practice it.

And he thinks things are looking up: hunting, he thinks, is dying off.

He writes: “there's very little hunters or small-town merchants can do to save their dying enterprises.”

He may have been referring to this story, which bemoans much the same thing:

…According to numbers from the Fish and Wildlife Service, there were 747,000 hunters in Wisconsin in 1990; by 2000, that number had dropped to 591,000, a 21 percent drop in just a decade.

Or maybe not: McNally uses a different number himself. And these numbers differ from the DNR’s: according to this report, Wisconsin sold over 640,000 licenses this year – a declining number, but still over 11% of the population.

Other than going to church and watching the Packers, is there any other single activity that so many of us do?

And with the exception of 2004, the harvest (“slaughter,” I suppose, to McNally) has grown every season since 2002.

Hunting may not be exploding in popularity, but it’s hardly on the endangered list.

Add to that: the WSJ story cites 85% approval of hunting in Wisconsin, and as the Tomah Journal points out:

Four years ago, “society as a whole” in Wisconsin passed a constitutional amendment affirming the right to fish and hunt with 82 percent of the vote.

So McNally isn’t just an odious jerk: he’s an extremist odious jerk.

None of this means there aren’t potential problems ahead. General reductions in available hunting land – something McNally cheers – is a concern.

If it’s even happening. There’s no real source for that information. It’s a little hard to nail down.

And, hey, if it’s happening, join a sportsmen’s club. Find a local wildlife manager. Ask around. There’s public land open. There’s private land open.

Make sure and tell the owners thanks, and would you like a roast?

Here’s another potential problem: the whitetail herd was estimated at 1.8 million head this year – way over the DNR’s target size, and a sizeable increase over last year.

A bigger herd is a good thing – it makes it more likely that I’ll get a deer. It makes it more likely that out-of-staters will get one, and want to come back.

But it also means more car collisions. More crop damage. And, eventually, it’ll mean more predators (the four-legged kind) moving further south.

If McNally has another suggestion for controlling the herd, he doesn’t mention it. If hunting begins to decline, the state will have to re-incentivize it, and bring them back.

My regular readers (both of them) will know: I’m a comfortable indoorsman. I like my computer. I like my couch. I like to read and cook and do other indoor kinds of things.

I’ve been hunting for two years, and – indoorsmanship aside – I love it. Love getting up early, getting outside, fighting the cold and the snow, strategizing, training, preparing, hunting.

If I can become a hunter, anyone can.

Is hunting in danger? I can’t say for sure. But I can say this: McNally hates small-town Wisconsin. Given that, he can’t know for sure, either.

Shoot a Deer, Save the World!

Divorce sucks. Ask most any divorced person, and they’ll tell you.

And now we’ve got a whole new reason to think so: the divorced are bad for the environment!

"A married household actually uses resources more efficiently than a divorced household," said Jianguo Liu, an ecologist at Michigan State University...

More households means more use of land, water and energy, three critical resources, Liu explained in a telephone interview.

… A household uses the same amount of heat or air conditioning whether there are two or four people living there. A refrigerator used the same power whether there is one person home or several. Two people living apart run two dishwashers, instead of just one.

I suppose the same could be said for adult children living with their parents, rather than striking out on their own, but let’s not give them any ideas. If you’re already feeling guilty about that divorce, rest assured: it’s even worse than you thought!

But wait! Married couples are far more likely to have more children than divorced couples. This owes to the fact that, crude barroom jokes notwithstanding, married couples tend to have sex more often than divorced couples.

And, as we already know, children are bad for the environment:

A radical form of “offsetting” carbon dioxide emissions to prevent climate change is proposed today – having fewer children.

Each new UK citizen less means a lifetime carbon dioxide saving of nearly 750 tonnes, a climate impact equivalent to 620 return flights between London and New York*, the Optimum Population Trust says in a new report.

So rest easy, divorced people! You’re actually helping the environment.

Unless, that is, you spoil your kids in a guilty and misguided attempt to make sure they love you. Sure, son, you can eat that box of Twinkies while spending six hours a day playing Nintendo. Just don’t tell your mother.

That leads to fat kids and, as we all know, obesity is bad for the environment:

Want to spend less at the pump? Lose some weight. That's the implication of a new study that says Americans are burning nearly 1 billion more gallons of gasoline each year than they did in 1960 because of their expanding waistlines.

On the other hand, divorced people are, as they say, back in the game. Dating. So they’ll want to get into shape. Buff up a little. Lose some weight, which will save gas and, thus, help the environment.

That probably doesn’t completely wipe out the childhood obesity factor, since children grow and gain weight naturally as a result of their being, y’know, children.

Still, it’s an offset.

So let’s review: having fewer kids plus losing weight minus letting your kids get fat equals environmental neutrality.

It must be true. You read it on the internet.

Of course, the formula doesn’t quite work if you’re Jewish:

…a group of Israeli environmentalists is encouraging Jews around the world to light at least one less candle this Hanukka [sic] to help the environment.

The founders of the Green Hanukkia [sic] campaign found that every candle that burns completely produces 15 grams of carbon dioxide. If an estimated one million Israeli households light for eight days, they said, it would do significant damage to the atmosphere.

Ah, our friends of the Jewish faith: carrying on a rampage of Zionist imperialism by making the planet unfit for human life, which, as we all know, hits the poor – i.e., the Palestinians – hardest.

Still with me? Yes? So you’re lost, too, then.

Luckily, Jews living in Wisconsin have an easy way to balance the requirements of their religious observances with those of the environment: become hunters.

The poor old Scandinavian moose is now being blamed for climate change, with researchers in Norway claiming that a grown moose can produce 2,100 kilos of carbon dioxide a year -- equivalent to the CO2 output resulting from a 13,000 kilometer car journey.

Surely, bagging a moose will offset those candles! Moose are in short supply around here, true, but don’t worry. Three or four whitetails should have about the same effect.

It’s enough to make one think: we could probably beat global warming once and for all, if only we got rid of all the obese, divorced, Jewish non-hunters in the world.

Or at least recruited more anorexic, polygamous, atheist (but non-incense burning) Ted Nugent fans.

Reforming Campaign Finance Reform

Governor Doyle has called the Legislature into special session – finally – to consider and hopefully pass comprehensive campaign finance reform.

Hey, the time has come. We should reform campaign finance. A complete overhaul.

I’m serious. I’m with the Governor.

Oh, I don’t support the actual legislation he’s pushing – some combination of two existing bills. “Reforming” campaign finance hasn’t slowed campaign spending at all so far: it’s only forced that money to follow a different path. More “reform” will do more of the same.

Same money, less accountability, more breathless headlines and wailing and gnashing of teeth.

So no, I don’t support the Governor’s proposal. But I support reforming campaign finance.

The standard campaign finance reform boils down to: limiting a person’s ability to communicate with others. In politics, that means telling people who you are, and why they should vote for you.

The higher the office, the harder that becomes. Simply standing on a soapbox won’t do it. You have to rely more on mass media, and that costs money.

Oh, sure, you can pay for it all yourself – and, thanks to CFR laws, it’s more and more likely that only millionaires who can self-fund will run for office. Or you can take out loans. Or you can ask others to help you out.

But the law places strict limits on that already. The law limits how much you can collect; how much each person can give; in some cases, how much you can spend.

The law limits your ability to communicate.

Normally, one would expect liberals and Democrats to champion fewer restrictions on free speech. Not in this case. Less speech, more regulation! Government must step in! Let’s reform campaign finance!

No, really. Let’s. Except, let’s stop doing what clearly hasn’t worked so far. Let’s stop trying to limit the money.

Remove all limits from candidates. All of them. If a candidate wants to take a cool million from a single contributor, he or she can do so.

Just like a millionaire could spend a million of his/her own money. Just like WMC or WEAC or WRTL or the Potawatomi can pool the resources of a thousand Americans who have – or who should have – the God-given rights of assembly and free speech, and spend a million promoting what’s important to them.

Let the candidates spend as much as they want – as much as they can – promoting their own candidacies.

It will be better. Limiting campaign contributions the way we do doesn’t prevent corruption: it contributes to the culture of political corruption.

That sounds like a contradiction, but it’s true. By limiting contributions, we make each contribution that much more valuable. We increases demand for contributions, and thus candidates are more likely to be faced with – and succumb to – the quid pro quo.

Removing the limits would reduce the sheer amount of time candidates have to spend raising money. It would reduce the importance of individual contributions, which would reduce the influence of individual contributions.

What else? Well, CFR has been a factor in the rise of “issue advocacy,” which reformers now want to regulate and limit even further than they already have.

But if candidates can spend as much as they like, those groups might simply contribute the money, let the candidate handle the campaigning, and spend their own time and effort elsewhere.

This would mean better accountability, since candidates have to report contributions and spending.

And the best part: we avoid curtailing the First Amendment.

Oh, fine, there are some flaws in my plan. It might just accelerate the financial arms race, for one. And it would not end the appearance of corruption. It would not end the possibility that a corrupt (or corruptible) politician might take money in exchange for a vote.

But. In 1912, Fighting Bob LaFollette took the equivalent (in today’s dollars) of $600,000 from three supporters, and the equivalent of $100,000 per month from another supporter.

Were today’s campaign finance laws in place then, LaFollette may never have tried for the Presidency. Certainly, he wouldn’t have come as close as he did.

Do today’s reformers ever ask themselves: by making it so hard to raise the money to run for office, are we preventing another LaFollette?