Author

Ruth Conniff

Ruth Conniff

Ruth Conniff is Editor-in-chief of the Wisconsin Examiner. Conniff is a frequent guest on MSNBC and has appeared on Good Morning America, Democracy Now!, Wisconsin Public Radio, CNN, Fox News and many other radio and television outlets. She has also written for The Nation, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Los Angeles Times, among other publications. Her book "Milked: How an American Crisis Brought Together Midwestern Dairy Farmers and Mexican Workers" won the 2022 Studs and Ida Terkel Award from The New Press.

COMMENTARY

Learning from Bob Menendez and Robin Vos

By: - September 28, 2023

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 […]

COMMENTARY
A voting ward sign in Milwaukee County. (Photo | Isiah Holmes)

Wisconsin is a top worry for election watchdog

By: - September 22, 2023

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 […]

Signage at an early voting center

National Voter Registration Day is Tuesday

By: - September 19, 2023

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 […]

COMMENTARY
"No vote for you" sign

Defending democracy in Wisconsin

By: - September 15, 2023

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 […]

Screenshot from Planned Parenthood Zoom press conference. From top left: Analiese Eicher, Dr. Allison Linton, Tanya Atkins, Michelle Velasquez

Planned Parenthood to resume abortion services in Wisconsin

By: - September 14, 2023

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. […]

COMMENTARY
a row of three yellow school buses

How anti-government ideologues targeted Wisconsin public schools 

By: - September 5, 2023

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 […]

COMMENTARY
Protester in a MAGA cheesehead at the Reopen Wisconsin rally at the Capitol on April 24, 2020 (photo by Luther Wu).

Lawless MAGA Republicans are trying to overthrow democracy

By: - August 30, 2023

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 […]

COMMENTARY
Speaker Robin Vos flies with former President Donald Trump to talk election audit on 8/21/21 | Vos official Facebook

Wisconsin’s Trump enablers are still undermining democracy

By: - August 22, 2023

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 […]

COMMENTARY
Bailey LeRoy and her mother, Tara LeRoy, participated in a march on the Capitol in June to publicize the funding needs of the state's schools. Bailey is a fifth grader at Palmyra-Eagle Elementary, which has been threatened with closure because of lack of funds. (Photo courtesy of Tara LeRoy.)

Wisconsin’s public schools and the war on democracy

By: - August 14, 2023

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 […]

COMMENTARY
Boy's feet by spilt milkshake

What a temper tantrum by the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s chief justice tells us

By: - August 10, 2023

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 

By: and - August 7, 2023

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 […]

Vice President Kamala Harris at the Sanmira Corporation electronics manufacturing plant in Pleasant Prairie, Wisconsin | Screenshot via White House video

V.P. Harris, Tammy Baldwin tout high speed internet project in Wisconsin

By: - August 3, 2023

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 […]