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Cory Tomczyk wages war on small media outlet
This is not a great time to be a newspaper. Besides continually meager, often plunging readership and ad revenues, there’s the fact that some people would like nothing more than to shut you down as a way to shut you up. Last Friday in Kansas, police raided the offices of the local newspaper, the Marion […]
Don’t delay on police records
Last week, I received some records from the Madison Police Department that I had requested about four months earlier. They concerned the one and only instance in which an MPD officer or employee was disciplined during the entire first three months of this year. The request, which I wrote about in the May issue of […]
Milwaukee case spurred effort to amend campaign finance law
Sylvia Ortiz-Velez admits she can be a bit nosy. The Democratic state representative from Milwaukee, who is also a member of the Milwaukee County Board, likes to poke around publicly filed campaign finance reports. “I like to look at who’s raised what,” she says in an interview. It was through such snooping that Ortiz-Velez realized […]
Liberals haven’t controlled the Wisconsin Supreme Court for a lot more than 15 years, if ever
On the day after Wisconsin’s nasty and expensive state Supreme Court election, the lead sentence of the Wisconsin State Journal’s front page election story proclaimed: “Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Janet Protasiewicz defeated conservative Dan Kelly for a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court Tuesday, giving liberals a court majority for the first time in 15 […]
Dan Kelly’s divine inspiration
In his Editor’s Introduction to the inaugural issue of the Regent University Law Review, the once and potentially future Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Daniel Kelly was quite sure about both the provenance of law and its immutability. “Law originates with God and is impressed on His creation, including mankind,” Kelly wrote in 1991, the year […]
Wisconsin Supreme Court candidate Dan Kelly makes his case
What Daniel Kelly wants, what he really, really wants, is to be able to throw his support behind Jennifer Dorow, his fellow conservative candidate for Wisconsin Supreme Court, should she advance from the Feb. 21 primary and he doesn’t. “I would love to be able to make that commitment,” Kelly told a gathering of Dane […]
What I learned from my mom
In January 1995 my mother, Elaine Benz, sent me a newspaper clipping of a letter she had written to the editor of the Milwaukee Journal. She was 70 at the time. I’m pretty sure it was the only one she ever wrote. It was a response to another letter writer who had opined that anyone […]
Wisconsin GOP flyer warns voters: Your neighbors are watching
The Republican Party of Wisconsin is distributing a mailer warning recipients that whether or not they voted is a matter of public record, and their neighbors will know if they don’t. “URGENT” declares the mailer sent to a resident in an independent living facility in Madison last week, and presumably to many others. “Don’t Let […]
Closing the book on my mother’s eviction: ‘A sad thing that happened’
Last week my sister, Diane, and I met with two officials from the Wisconsin Department of Health Services, at their invitation, to discuss the state’s decision to dismiss two citations it had issued against a Milwaukee-area senior care facility that last fall evicted our then-97-year-old mother, Elaine Benz. It was the first time that anyone […]
Records reveal state officials’ response to elder eviction
The head of a state agency charged with enforcing Wisconsin’s rules regarding nursing homes and other residential care facilities was blindsided to learn that unknown others in state government had rescinded citations issued to a Milwaukee-area provider regarding the unlawful eviction of my then-97-year-old mother, Elaine Benz. “This is news to me that we withdrew […]
Wisconsin school district rejects book about Japanese internment
A school board in southeastern Wisconsin has rejected a book recommended for use in a 10th-grade accelerated English class due in part to concerns that it lacked “balance” regarding the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. The Curriculum Planning Committee for the Muskego-Norway district, which serves about 5,000 students in Waukesha and Racine […]
Could sleepy office nix Wisconsin’s pick for president?
After decades of having its powers chipped away by the Legislature, the Wisconsin secretary of state’s office has become largely irrelevant. The office holder’s most important remaining duty is to sit on the state Board of Commissioners of Public Lands, which oversees some state investment funds and land holdings. But the office is also the […]