The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Monday that Wisconsin Justices Annette Ziegler and Michael Gableman must disqualify themselves from hearing any cases involving Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce. That is an oversimplification, but not by much. Here is how the NY Times summarized the decision in a front page story today: Elected judges must disqualify themselves from […]
Robert Mentzer of the Wausau Daily Herald reported today that a Republican Party of Marathon County spokesperson has been stripped of his duties for criticizing the colossal conservative mouthpiece Rush Limbaugh.The now former Marathon County GOP spokesperson, Kevin Stevenson, was let go after he poked Rush for hoping President Obama would fail. The remarks made […]
In the vein of his conservative, anti-government anything attitude, Scott Walker tried to veto $100,000 of the funding for a county parks jobs program put forth in a 2009 budget. Thankfully, the Milwaukee County Board overrode his veto.So you might have been scratching your head if you attended an outdoor ceremony last Friday when Walker […]
Few are more vulnerable than children who by no fault of their own are placed in the child welfare system. Our state and state’s counties have a moral, if not sensible, obligation to ensure the safety and health of these children. But with Scott Walker at the helms in Milwaukee County, a new study shows […]
A story in the Journal Sentinel this morning might as well been a press release from the garbage lobby: ‘Plan would make Wisconsin’s garbage fees highest in nation, group says.’ Wow, that’s quite a claim! I wonder who this group is and why they care about Wisconsin?According to its website the National Solid Wastes Management […]
Wisconsin Attorney General JB Van Hollen is sobbing because his department was subject to some of the same agency cuts necessary to balance the state’s budget in light of the $6.6 billion deficit caused by the failed Bush administration which caused nationwide economic collapse. Before anyone huffs that depriving Van Hollen of every dime he […]
An online petition campaign to preserve the state’s existing law regulating licensing of new nuclear power reactors has been launched by the Wisconsin Network for Peace and Justice (WNPJ) in cooperation with One Wisconsin Now (OWN). The message: Dear Friend, We urgently need your help to maintain reasonable restrictions on nuclear power in Wisconsin. […]
There are few things as ubiquitous as the golden arches of McDonald’s. Rarely is one more than a quick car ride away from the glorious greasy gut bomb of a quarter pounder with cheese or an order of mystery meat McNuggets. But here in Wisconsin, there is one industry that has penetrated our communities, large, […]
Here at OWN we got the following listing for an event for folks who have unfortunately lost their jobs in these tough times. Please pass the word around to your friends and neighbors who are looking for some support! You can register for the event by calling Buzz Davis at 608-873-4886 or register online at […]
Lead GOP budget talker Rep. Robin Vos is likely to put his “Protect Rich People” crying towel into overdrive in the coming hours. In the interest of fairness, here are a couple of things to remember when Vos claims that by opposing the tax boost for the top one percent and closing a portion of […]
Seemingly irrelevant Republican Assembly honcho Jeff Fitzgerald returned from a long spring nap to yammer about plans by the state’s budget writing committee to work part of this coming Memorial Day weekend. Dusting off his keyboard and reintroducing himself to capitol staff, Lil’ Fitz fired off a press release today complaining about the proposed Friday […]
Judge for yourself. http://www.onewisconsinnow.org/GOPbudget By all accounts it’s still a big, fat nothing from the state Republicans on how to solve the massive budget deficit the eight years of failed George W. Bush policies have levied on Wisconsin and nearly every state in the nation. One Wisconsin Now sent our OWNews reporter Cody Oliphant to […]
You wouldn’t know it from the news media — they can only cover one story at a time, and there’s a state budget crisis — but there is a growing, resurgent movement in Wisconsin determined to solve the energy and climate crises without resorting to nuclear energy. It’s not the old “No Nukes”movement, although there […]
What if your partner was in the hospital and you legally couldn’t visit him or her? Or if you got seriously ill, and your partner couldn’t take time off from work to help care for you? Thousands of our family members, friends and neighbors in committed and caring same-sex relationships don’t have basic legal protections […]
Nuclear power, being heralded by some as the solution to the global warming crisis, has a few problems, and they’re not minor. One is safety; the potential for an accident or terrorism is ever-present. Another is the lack of any safe, permanent way to dispose of the highly radioactive waste. And, today the Wisconsin Public […]
The unfortunately-not-frogged-marched-yet Karl Rove spent Friday meeting with investigators about the possible illegal purging of U.S. Attorneys who the Bush administration thought weren’t abusing their authority and charging enough Democrats with crimes in the lead-up to the 2006 elections. Rove, a central player in a number of bastardizations of the U.S. Department of Justice, was […]
Oh, the Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce and its awards. The most recent: Wal-Mart won WMC’s “Business Friend of the Environment Award.” Guess they must have missed this three-page list of offenses by Wal-Mart against our clean air and water that Wal-Mart Watch put together. The violations include small infractions like widespread water pollution, air pollution […]
Let’s Rave at Rove! Karl Rove is coming to town to talk down the EMPLOYEE FREE CHOICE ACT. He’s found the time in between investigations of his behavior by Congress into tampering with the justice system and avoiding subpenas for contempt. Just the spokesman the sponsors, Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce, needs. Let’s talk up the […]
GOP state budget spokesperson Rep. Robin Vos must be calculating he’s never going to get called to carpet for anything he tells the press about the state budget. Either that or he can’t read.On an interview posted yesterday on WisconsinEye.com, Vos claims that if the Assembly Republican budget from 2007 had been passed, that Wisconsin […]
Here’s a gem. A new video from Public Citizen demonstrates just how easy it is for un-patriotic corporations to set up an offshore tax haven and avoid paying taxes in the US. An intern at Public Citizen, Jessica, calls a lawyer in Panama about setting up a shell corporation there. The lawyer tells her “Panamanian […]
On the WisconsinEye newsmakers program taped just this morning, Robin Vos was asked how, as a small business owner, he was doing given the historic economic collapse from which America and Wisconsin desperately tries to emerge. Vos, who explained he has three separate businesses and owns rental property in Whitewater, offered that he and his […]
After more than four months we finally have an answer to the question: What’s the Republican plan for closing the state budget deficit? According to Wispolitics.com, ‘Rep. Robin Vos, R-Racine, said Republicans support closing the gap by reducing spending through furloughs, a pay freeze, reducing the number of state employees and holding departments to last […]
Activists in the One Wisconsin Now community have sent over 5,300 email messages to the Board of Directors of the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce (MMAC) demanding the big business special interest group drop its lawsuit preventing paid sick days from becoming law in Milwaukee. OWN launched the action last week in advance of the […]
Cory Leibmann had some particularly insightful comments on the “news” this weekend about a fake grassroots effort the right is trying fund. A couple of guys looking for a paycheck on the state’s right wing want to create another 14 organizations to go with their dozens of current organizations, such as the Wisconsin Policy Research […]
Career politicians really get my goat. Even worse is a career politician who makes his bones by selling out Wisconsin’s students to for-profit corporations in exchange for campaign contributions. Exhibit A: Brett Davis (R-Oregon) Brett used to be the chair of the Assembly Education Committee. And during his career in the legislature, Brett’s been leading […]
I get the need to ask both sides about the budget. But why does the state GOP’s abrasively-nasal budget face get to dole out criticism without once having to detail the alternative plan to close the formerly $5.4 billion and now $6.5 billion budget deficit. Frederica Freyberg took a whack at it last month when […]
This is good. So Grover Norquist’who’s regularly full of bad ideas (see: Reagan Day)’had a brain fart a few years back from which came the Taxpayer Protection Caucus. But here’s the real kicker: heading up the Wisconsin caucus this year is the one and only Randy Hopper, who once and only once paid state income […]
For some reason, Wispolitics.com offered a lil’ nugget in its afternoon summary about noted minority vote suppressor and GOP state party chair Reince Priebus doing a planned closed-door meeting with ‘business leaders about their concerns.’ ‘It’s closed to the media’ the Wispo gang reports. While my first response was ‘so?’ after thinking for a nanosecond, […]
The pride of the Journal Communications radio syndication line-up, Michael Savage, has been officially banned from entering Britain. Reported in the Huffington Post, Savage is on a list of people unable to go into the country for his fostering of hatred and extremism.Among Savage’s company on the list includes Rev. Fred Phelps, screamer of hateful, […]
Passing along the word on this great opportunity with a great purpose. Check out the detaiis on the ‘We’re Looking for Work’ Town Meeting below: Tuesday, May 5th, 5:00pm to 9:15pm Have you been laid-off, downsized, or part-timed & now you’re looking for work? The Stoughton Alliance for Retired Americans, the Stoughton Job Networking and […]
Funny how big a crowd of 5,000 (if it really was that big) played in the media when it was right-wing teabaggers coming to protest paying for their government services. It was portrayed as a mammoth grassroots uprising, a taxpayer revolt. When perhaps twice that number of people marched in Milwaukee Friday for immigration and […]
The state Senate and Assembly are expected to pass the historic “Equal Pay” bill later today to provide workers who have been discriminated against in employee pay because of their gender a legal recourse other than the over-crowded federal court system. Authored by Rep. Chris Sinicki and Sen. Dave Hansen, the bill is good for […]
Musings on Day One of Scooter Walker’s second ill-fated run for governor: *** Announcing first on Twitter and Charlie Sykes’s show was a stroke of genius — if you think the hard core lunatic fringe and Walker fanatics are going to be enough to win the election. But creative use of the Sykes show is […]
From our pals at Health Care for America Now, Wisconsin Join Tammy Baldwin for a town hall meeting on national health care reform Friday, May 1st, at 5:30pm. Congresswoman Tammy Baldwin sits on an important Health Subcommittee in the House of Representatives. This could be our last opportunity to speak with Tammy before key votes […]
A graduate student in nuclear engineering at UW-Madison, Brian Kiedrowski, has solved the nuclear waste disposal problem — something the nuclear industry and the federal government have failed at for 50 years. Can a Nobel Prize be far behind? Details.
The Bradley Foundation decided to award always-wrong-about-everything conservative columnist and FOXNews commentator Bill Kristol with a $250,000 award.
Sexual deviant Bill O’Reilly jumped the shark of reality last night. I know, pointing out idiocy by the lying O’Reilly is like pointing out vastness in the night sky. It’s endless as scientific fact. I happened to be flipping through the channels tonight and heard him screaming to a reporter from Newsday that Attorney General […]
Making its rounds at the capitol this year is AB38: a bill devised to exclude from taxable income gains from a Wisconsin business. As the Legislative Reference Bureau understands it, a corporation ‘may exclude the capital gain realized from the sale of any asset held more than one year.’ It estimates the bill would decrease […]
Grist, the provocative online environmental magazine with an attitude, asks whether Earth Day, bring celebrated on Wednesday for the 40th year, still has any purpose or relevance. As the biographer of Gaylord Nelson, Earth Day’s founder, my response is probably predictable. Others offer their takes, too. Happy Earth Day.
Yesterday our NRA-backed Attorney General, JB Van Hollen, claimed that openly carrying a firearm should not result in a disorderly conduct charge in a memorandum issued to Wisconsin’s district attorneys. Yesterday was also April 20, 2009’ten years to the day after the Columbine Massacre in Colorado: the most infamous school shooting in U.S. history sparked […]
Its been exactly ten years since the horrific murders of 12 students and a teacher and wounding of 23 more victims at the Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado at the hands of the heavily-armed Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris. Former Bush appointee and current Wisconsin Attorney General JB Van Hollen is commemorating this massacre […]
On Monday, April 20, the 10th anniversary of the massacre at Columbine High School , Wisconsin Anti-Violence Effort (WAVE) sets off on a journey, covering 450 miles in three days, to raise awareness about gun violence and to call for common sense solutions. The tour, “A Journey for Justice: Preventing Gun Violence Across Wisconsin”, features […]
Her name was Marjorie, but everyone called her Midge. Midge Miller, the quintessential West Side Madison liberal and tireless activist for peace and progressive causes, has left us at age 86. The Wisconsin Network for Peace and Justice website has links to moving tributes from John Nichols, Stu Levitan and Paul Soglin. A memorial service […]
The “news” from the latest St. Norbert’s poll is that Gov. Doyle is allegedly at the nadir of his popularity, because less than 50 percent are satisfied or very satisfied with his leadership. Time is ticking and soon the chorus of Wisconsin conservatives will be claiming this “drop in popularity” is due to the Governor […]
The non non-ideological conservative Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance is once again showing its stripes — this time shooting out the same talking points being argued by the Republican members of the state’s budget writing committee. As reported on the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s politics blog, WTA head Todd Berry shipped out a newsletter complaining about what is […]
Your pals at One Wisconsin Now decided to attend Wednesday’s Fox News Teabag Party in Madison ‘ and thanks to all of the screamers, yammerers and name-callers who reinforced our faith in humanity and democracy. Our mission: make sure a ‘thank you’ was offered by wealthiest one percent, whose potential increase in taxes sparked this […]
Just a couple of regular guys, fed-up taxpayers taking part in a mainstream, grassroots revolt:
Have you heard? High level radioactive waste is no big deal. Not to worry. Soon we’ll have a way to dispose of it, maybe just fuse it into glass cubes and you can store them under your coffee table or something. Or maybe it won’t happen right away, but certainly within the next century or […]
The fine individuals financing the racist, lawbreaking All Children Matter, who want to see our public education tax dollars go to private, for-profit companies, have dumped late cash into the Rose Fernandez race. Reports filed with the state show Betsy DeVos, the Michigan wife of ACM founder Dick DeVos shipped a last-minute $1,000 check to […]
A joint study from the conservative MacIver Institute and the anti public school Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice makes the claim that high school dropouts are a burden to taxpayers of Wisconsin. Fair enough. But the source and timing of the study raise some serious eyebrows.Besides being a conservative think tank with a staff of […]