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Learning from Bob Menendez and Robin Vos
Say what you will about Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J), the motives for his alleged crimes are crystal clear. It doesn’t take an advanced degree in public policy to understand the “eye-popping photos of gold bars and money-stuffed envelopes” — as reporter Dana DiFilippo of the New Jersey Monitor put it — which Menendez and his […]
Wisconsin is a top worry for election watchdog
David Becker, executive director of The Center for Election Innovation & Research (CEIR) and co-author of “The Big Truth: Upholding Democracy in the Age of the Big Lie,” said Tuesday that Wisconsin is “on the top of my list” of places that could be engulfed by chaos after the 2024 election. False claims of voter […]
National Voter Registration Day is Tuesday
Tuesday is National Voter Registration Day, and the League of Women Voters has plans to reach more than 100,000 voters nationwide. Since 2012, nonpartisan civic organizations have worked together to register hundreds of thousands of voters on a single day in September. “The right to vote is the backbone of our democracy and it is […]
Defending democracy in Wisconsin
Wisconsin is Ground Zero for attacks on democracy, which generated a tsunami of news from the Capitol this week. On Thursday, as Henry Redman reports, Republicans in the Senate voted to remove the state’s highly respected, nonpartisan administrator of elections, Meagan Wolfe, in order to appease election conspiracy theorists. Meanwhile, in the Assembly, Speaker Robin […]
Planned Parenthood to resume abortion services in Wisconsin
On Thursday morning, Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin announced that it will resume providing abortion services at clinics in Madison and Milwaukee. The announcement comes after more than a year during which abortion services were suspended in Wisconsin following the June 2022 U.S. Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade and ending federally protected abortion rights. […]
How anti-government ideologues targeted Wisconsin public schools
Now that the new school year has started, I’ve been volunteering on the Madison East High School cross-country team, trying to keep up with 80 or so kids as they run through Madison’s east side neighborhoods and around the fields behind the school. A former East runner myself, I’ve always been a Purgolder partisan. All […]
Lawless MAGA Republicans are trying to overthrow democracy
These are not normal times. Still, as Will Bunch observed in a powerful column for the Philadelphia Inquirer, out of force of habit, laziness or just plain denial, a lot of journalists continue to treat the Republican presidential contest as if it were a regular political event instead of the lawless authoritarian movement it really […]
Wisconsin’s Trump enablers are still undermining democracy
Even as Trump snubs the Republican Party by refusing to attend the debate in Milwaukee this week, his corrosive influence continues to permeate Wisconsin. The list of Wisconsinites named in Trump indictments keeps growing. It now includes the current chair of state Republican Party, Brian Schimming, who was involved in the fake electors scheme and […]
Wisconsin’s public schools and the war on democracy
It’s an understatement to say that public school advocates are not happy with the state budget Gov. Tony Evers signed. “We’re not here to cheer for crumbs,” Heather DuBois Bourenane, executive director of the Wisconsin Public Education Network, declared at the group’s annual Summer Summit last week. “This budget did not deliver and will not […]
What a temper tantrum by the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s chief justice tells us
To hear Chief Justice Annette Ziegler and her right-wing allies describe it, you would think the new progressive majority on Wisconsin’s highest court was destroying a collegial institution, running roughshod over the integrity of the Court and threatening the very rule of law itself. “My colleagues’ unprecedented dangerous conduct is the raw exercise of overreaching […]
Evers signs school bus driver law, vetoes bills on energy, unemployment, occupational licensing
Gov. Tony Evers signed a bill into law at the New Glarus Elementary School Friday that adds school bus driver to the list of volunteer positions a school board member may hold. Board members who take the uncompensated position will need to receive a school bus endorsement from the Wisconsin Department of Transportation, hold a […]
V.P. Harris, Tammy Baldwin tout high speed internet project in Wisconsin
Vice President Kamala Harris traveled to Wisconsin Thursday to announce a new project she and the Finnish telecom company Nokia say will create up to 200 new jobs at a Kenosha County manufacturing plant making fiber optic products to be used in a nationwide expansion of high-speed internet. Speaking from a podium inside the Sanmira […]