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Politics

Congressman Steve King, But Not Only Steve King…

Bigoted congressman Steve King has lost his committee assignments, should be censured, and truly should leave politics forever. And yet, and yet, while King should go,  King shouldn’t head for the exit alone: The condemnations of Mr. King stood in stark contrast to the lawmakers’ willingness to tolerate President Trump’s frequent offensive and insensitive remarks about migrants, black people, Native Americans and other…

Sanders Says He Was ‘A Little Bit Busy’

Sydney Ember and Katie Benner report Sexism Claims from Bernie Sanders’s 2016 Run: Paid Less, Treated Worse: In February 2016, Giulianna Di Lauro, a Latino outreach strategist for Senator Bernie Sanders’s presidential operation, complained to her supervisor that she had been harassed by a campaign surrogate whom she drove to events ahead of the Democratic primary…

Who Said It Better: Falwell or Christ?

  A poor person never gave anyone a job. A poor person never gave anybody charity, not of any real volume. It’s just common sense to me. —  Jerry Falwell Jr. can’t imagine Trump ‘doing anything that’s not good for the country’.   41 He sat down opposite the treasury and observed how the crowd put…

The Broad Outlines of 2019

For many years, I would begin the year with predictions for the twelve months ahead.  Events since 2016 have made predictions harder,  but one can still discern some short-term developments for the city.  These prospects, of course, form an online of topics to ponder, and about which to write (often requiring that one return to the…

Beyond Milwaukee and Madison: Walker’s ‘erosion of support in diverse set of cities and suburbs’

The WISGOP, under Speaker Vos and Majority Leader Fitzgerald, falsely contends that Scott Walker lost only because of the Dane County & City of Milwaukee vote.  A claim like this is myopic, of course: the close election turned as much on where Walker underperformed as where Evers performed well.  Craig Gilbert looks at the election data…

The Myth of the Adult in the Room

National stories – about national principles – apply to places big and small, including Whitewater, Wisconsin. Monica Hesse’s John Kelly and the myth of the ‘adult in the room’ summarizes about a national figure a myth that’s common locally, too: If you can remember back to Kelly’s appointment, six thousand years ago in 2017, the…

The Incredible Shrinking Man

How very odd, truly, that even now Gov. Walker feels compelled to retweet a story from the MacIver Institute praising his tenure. (That organization’s motto –  ‘the free market voice for Wisconsin’ – is incredible: they’ve spent years boosting Walker’s corporate welfare and crony capitalism.  Walker’s shown no understanding of, or respect for, free-market economics.)…

The New Version of Old

One reads that the Daily Union has a new publisher.  Stories about that chain publisher show that (so far) it has changed little at its papers.  A sale of some kind, to someone, is no surprise.  The new publisher has a string of small-town papers, and no sign of a strategy for better reasoning or…

A Site on Facebook: ‘Nothing on this page is real’

Standards have fallen so low that, whether of right or left, trolls take advantage of gullible and ignorant people on Facebook each day.  Eli Saslow reports how a liberal troll tricks impressionable conservatives.  The people tricking, and the people being tricked, are evidence of (respectively) ethical or educational decline.  First the unethical tricksters: He [forty-something Christopher Blair] had…

Wisconsin 2020

Craig Gilbert writes Wisconsin already expected to be a war zone for the 2020 presidential race: Almost everything about the Nov. 6 midterm election bolstered Wisconsin’s status as a top presidential target in 2020, when this state has no race for governor or U.S. Senate but can expect an all-out war over its 10 electoral votes.…

Then Why Run as a Republican?

What the Daily Union lacks in journalism it supplies in comedy. Consider a recent story about a 43rd district assembly candidate: Republican Szerlong says he will work for people, not party. Oh, brother. If he’s focused on people over party, then why is he Republican Szerlong? Why not Citizen Szerlong, or Independent Szerlong, or Write-in…