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Ron Johnson defends Trump, reopening during the pandemic
In a Zoom call with reporters on Friday sponsored by the Milwaukee Press Club, Republican U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson defended his controversial comments at the outset of the pandemic comparing COVID-19 to the flu and its death toll to traffic fatalities. He also repeated his suggestion that government officials were going overboard with stay-at-home orders […]
Republican moderates and the banality of evil
If ever there were a time for so-called Republican moderates to stop making excuses for Donald Trump and stand up for some core values, it has long since come and gone. Yet here was retiring state Sen. Luther Olsen (R-Ripon), in his farewell interview with WisconsinEye on June 15, answering a question about what grade […]
Trump’s weird, rambling speech is a clear signal to supporters: Time to get off the Trump train
Was anyone comforted by Donald Trump’s Rose Garden speech announcing his executive order on safe policing? “There are bad police officers,” Trump acknowledged, “but they are very tiny.” This statement came after the president assured the families of Black people killed by police, “We are going to pursue what we said we will be pursuing, […]
Pocan proposes invalidating liability waivers for rallies during pandemic
Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Black Earth) announced on Tuesday that he is introducing legislation to prevent liability waivers from being enforced for indoor gatherings of 1,000 or more people in places where the 14-day COVID case trend is increasing. The Refusal to Accept Losses or Liability In Every Situation Act (RALLIES) Act would invalidate the liability […]
An advocate for Black lives on the bench
About 100 public defenders marched through the heat in downtown Madison on Monday, stopping in front of the Madison Police Department to listen to Mario White, a former public defender who was recently appointed by Gov. Tony Evers to be a Dane County Circuit Court judge, as he read the names of African Americans killed […]
New York Times says Wisconsin farmers among top beneficiaries of Trump aid
A front-page story in the print edition of The New York Times on Monday reports that Wisconsin has received more farm aid from the half-billion dollars doled out through a federal government emergency relief program than all but two states. The article is accompanied by a photo of Sarah Lloyd, a Wisconsin dairy farmer, Farmers […]
Pocan introduces uniform national standards for police
Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Black Earth) announced on Friday that he is introducing a bill called the Police Training and Accountability Act, to establish national training standards for all law-enforcement officers, as well as a civilian-law enforcement bill of rights. Under the proposed legislation, a civilian commission would set standards of training for police, which, Pocan […]
Rejecting Trump’s American carnage
Remember Donald Trump’s “American carnage” speech? In in his inaugural address — an opportunity most presidents use to unite and inspire the nation — Trump presented a vision of America so dark and violent it might have been the opening scene from a Batman movie: “Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities, […]
Wisconsin Supreme Court takes voter purge case
On Monday, the Wisconsin Supreme Court granted review of a lawsuit brought by the conservative Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) against the Wisconsin Elections Commission for not purging the voting rolls of more than 200,000 Wisconsin voters who might have moved. “We are pleased the Wisconsin Supreme Court has agreed to hear this […]
After the chaos, community cleanup
Hundreds of Madisonians carrying brooms, sponges and cleaning fluid converged on State Street early Sunday morning, to clean up the graffiti and broken glass left behind from Saturday night’s vandalism spree. “I’m really heartened by how many people are down here helping out,” said Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway, as she walked down State Street. The mayor […]
The Republicans’ Marie Antoinette moment
As the November election approaches, there is reason to believe the Republicans have gone too far. That’s hard to imagine, I know, in the era of Donald Trump. It shakes your faith in democracy when the President of the United States retweets racist rants and promotes his own cockamamie medical theories — prompting the makers […]
Biden reaches out to rural Wisconsin
Winning Wisconsin will be critical in the 2020 presidential election. But the coronavirus pandemic has put the kibosh on political rallies and door-to-door campaigning. So on Wednesday, presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden appeared from home at a virtual “rural issues roundtable” hosted by Rep. Ron Kind (D-La Crosse) to talk about the concerns of a […]