Sorry to be depressing, but there’s a pretty long loser list this year. The people who think they won aren’t really winners because their policy choices are harming the state, which is making us all losers.
The rule of law and voters were big losers this year thanks to that classless clown show, Wisconsin’s rogue Supreme Court, which is presiding over a new era of chaos and lawlessness, contempt for voters, juvenile score-keeping, and partisan game-playing. They’re trashing an important institution.
The new class of Democratic “election deniers” – the Maine Secretary of State, the Colorado Supreme Court, Alvin Bragg, etc. – join Wisconsin’s liberal justices on the list for trying to obliterate free and fair elections in this country. Reckless partisan prosecutors – the guy in New York, the lady down in Georgia – engaged in dangerous anything-goes lawfare because they don’t want voters to be able to choose their preferred candidate in the ballot box. In Wisconsin, they’re obliterating legislative district lines. Nationally, they’re trying to jail their leading political opponent and prevent voters from being able to pick him.
To these losers of the year, the legal apparatus is not about upholding justice or the Constitution (state or federal). It’s about political payback, and it’s something you see in banana republics, not America. Shame on the liberal media and all Democrats who are trying to normalize this attack on Democracy under the banner of saving it!
This was also the year that some Democrats decided anti-Semitism was okay. And don’t get us started about the disaster at the border…or Joe Biden’s collapsing economy, imploding housing market, and wavering cognition. If we see one more video of him wandering aimlessly around on stage, we’re going to scream! We’d put Biden on this list too, but it’s too obvious, and we’re sick of him.
Back to Wisconsin…. Working and middle-class folks were losers because Wisconsin’s governor refused to grant them a tax cut. Working and middle-class folks in Milwaukee were double losers because they also had to shoulder a new sales tax increase caused by reckless mismanagement of the city’s finances by local Democrats.
Speaking of Evers, he’s having a bad year, leading like a lame duck; unbridled from a looming re-election, the emperor has no clothes. Whether it’s vetoing laws that would prohibit irreversible transgender surgeries of children, stealing the name of a dead baseball legend, lying about his emails, or flip-flopping on a key redistricting point, Evers is showing himself for who always was: A vicious but inept partisan. On top of it, he screwed over Wisconsin property taxpayers for the next 402 years! Time for him to retire to the pickleball court.
DEI and defunding the police were losers because the tide of public opinion is turning against them. Jill Underly, another raging partisan, was a loser because she expected us to believe she couldn’t find the Internet in Europe to continue playing her political games.
The liberal media were losers; they censored more important stories and boosted public spending projects (like the Milwaukee museum boondoggle) without bothering to scrutinize the numbers.
We would make former UW-La Crosse Chancellor Joe Gow a loser of the year for his side-hustle as a vegan online porn star, but he’s probably raking in the bucks from his creepy OnlyFans page due to all the publicity, and he’s still a highly paid professor besides. If anyone’s the loser there, it’s the university’s reputation (he was writing books about this way back in 2018, and no one figured it out until 2023?)
Without further preamble, here are Wisconsin Right Now’s losers of the year:
Gov. Tony Evers
What a partisan hack! Evers pretended he was for tax cuts and reasonable moderation while he was running for election, but no amount of “folks” or “damns” threaded into his purposely folksy press releases can camouflage the fact that he’s a runaway partisan train wreck. We get it, we get it, lots of folks think his chief of staff is the “real” governor, but his name’s on the door, so the buck stops with him.
He vetoed a tax cut that would help working and middle-class taxpayers while ranting about the rich. WRONG.
He was willing to sacrifice pay raises for 34,000 working and middle-class state workers, as well as $800 million in funding and a new engineering building at UW-Madison on the altar of DEI. Even when the Regents flipped back into sanity, Evers didn’t bend. WRONG.
He was willing to give away the store to the Milwaukee Brewers, not even asking the wealthy team owner to contribute a single dime (while continuously ranting about the rich). WRONG.
He was a plaintiff in the grossly irresponsible and partisan redistricting lawsuit, hypocritically flip-flopping on a key issue (contiguity) and claiming it was unconstitutional when a short time ago, he said it was not. WRONG.
He is perfectly fine, apparently, with bosses in his office supervising people they are romantically involved with, because, it’s, well, no one’s “damn” business. WRONG.
Evers eliminated a HYPHEN to allow school districts to add $325 per student every year for the next four centuries, unless a future Republican Legislature and governor undo it. He changed Republican wording referring to the 2023-24 and 2024-25 school years by vetoing a hyphen and the number “20” to change the passage to the year 2425. That’s undemocratic; it goes against both the legislative intent and the will of the voters.
He’s presiding over a state government with a melting-down and short-staffed Department of Corrections with rat-infested prisons and a state workforce that apparently rarely comes into the office. Yet he wants to keep giving large taxpayer-funded checks hand over fist to daycare centers with sketchy violation histories or run by Swiss millionaires.
Evers has been wrong on every single issue.
Then, the cherry on the top, it turns out he’s been masquerading as a deceased baseball legend in state emails, and when outed, he lied on TV that people could have every single one of them if they filed an open records request, when his office had already denied every single one of them after receiving an open records request. He also ignored the request of the legend’s family that he apologize. The use of a secret alias email flies against the spirit of open governance, at the least, and if it turns out the governor did not turn over all Warren Spahn emails to open records requesters in the past, he’s got a really big problem. Of course, how would anyone know? HE WON’T RELEASE THE EMAILS, despite what he said on TV.
This, folks, is who Tony Evers really is. He’s mastered the art of trashing Republicans, though. He is, hands-down, our #1 loser of the year.
Milwaukee Public Museum CEO Ellen Censky
The museum is run by an arrogant and out-of-touch leader, Ellen Censky, who studied beetle genitalia, and it shows.
The museum has counted on unquestioning, boosterish coverage from a pliant media to jam a $240 million new museum that almost no one wants down the throats of the public, with $90 million of it coming from taxpayer money for a museum entity that isn’t really public.
Museum officials have been full of dissembling statements and fuzzy math.
They tacked an additional $80-90 million to renovation cost estimates for updating exhibits in the current facility after saying that racial and equity concerns were not being met.
They said they needed a new building to get accredited exhibits, but that’s not true.
They said they would break ground in December 2023, but that didn’t happen.
When they revealed, predictably, that they are way behind in fundraising – like $90 million behind – they tried to recast the fundraising as a five-year plan (we don’t remember them saying that before) and moved the groundbreaking date back.
Maybe they are lagging in fundraising because 1) everyone likes the current museum (it’s a national treasure) and 2) there are other pressing priorities needing people’s money like a new criminal justice facility.
It turns out that concerned county supervisors can’t even get the fundraising numbers audited because there is no signed term sheet. Of course, they approved this partially taxpayer-funded boondoggle in a rushed-through process with minimal public comment as did state legislators. Turns out their massive deferred maintenance estimates include projections years from now.
Censky won’t grant us an interview. Instead, she’s been hiding behind a slick and vague PR operation. Museum officials have a strategy; they’re playing a liberal media game of “please reprint our press release or website” and counting on us not having enough reach to matter. WRONG (go look at your fundraising numbers, CEO Censky….)
Everyone likes the current museum – yes, it’s one of the few UNIFYING institutions in Milwaukee that draws a huge audience from city and suburbs alike, it’s a treasure of historic art and nostalgia, so, of course, they want to destroy it!
And we do mean literally destroy it. They’ve admitted they can’t fully move the Streets of Old Milwaukee, so they’re re-imagining it (i.e. destroying it)! But why? They are mum on the European Village, but that doesn’t seem to be in play at all in a DEI-obsessed environment. So they’re destroying that, too.
Citizen petition drives were launched to save both. They don’t seem to care. Of course, Censky once made it clear she wanted to change the “white, Eurocentric perspective” of the current museum.
What of the extraordinary murals, some of them the work of well-known historic German artists? They can’t all be moved.
Destroying history and art seems to us to be exactly the opposite of what a museum should do.
They’ve retained a slick New York firm to create what will surely, if it ever gets built, be a modern techno-dazzling monstrosity without soul. We love the old museum, with its nooks and crannies and imperfections, with Granny on the rocking chair and the sounds of the pow-wow exhibit echoing through the hall and the intricate beauty of the historic dioramas. We love peeking into the homes in the European Village. And who doesn’t love the rattlesnake button!
This just needs to stop. No one can convince us that you can’t renovate the old 1960s-era building instead. We get there are some issues. Put the collections off-site (they would be any way in a new building) and fix the actual current maintenance issues. Update the exhibits by adding to the offerings, not destroying what people love. Heck, in New York and Europe, the museums date back to the 1800s or earlier, and they’re not falling apart. You can’t convince us that destroying beloved works of history and art to spend millions in taxpayer money for a much smaller building makes any sense.
The county and state should get a spine and pull the money. If you’re thinking of donating? Don’t.
Read all of our investigative pieces on the museum here.
Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul
Josh Kaul has always been a partisan hack, but he’s continued to fail at his core leadership mandate: To manage his department’s resources appropriately and keep the state safe.
He still hasn’t fixed the crime lab, and that is where the rubber meets the road.
We repeat: He still hasn’t fixed the crime lab. He dragged former AG Brad Schimel for his crime lab statistics, but Kaul’s numbers are worse on a host of key points, and his “it’s COVID” excuse has completely run out.
The state crime lab was far less productive and effective in 2022. He is handling 41% fewer cases than his Republican predecessor did in 2017, but his backlogs in DNA analysis and other key categories are worse, even though he has received $12 million in ARPA money to fix the crime lab. Kaul’s output has plummeted.
He’s shown no leadership on a host of serious public safety issues bedeviling the state; Kaul has been completely AWOL on important issues like the court backlogs or reckless driving in Milwaukee. Yet he sure does have time for partisan legal games!
We have never had a more partisan AG.
Kaul’s arrogance is exemplified by his handling of open government issues. As AG, he is supposed to be the state’s top enforcer of open records laws. Yet his office sat on an important open records request we filed for 1.5 years, and we are not alone!
When we finally got the records, well after the AG race was over of course, they confirmed what a source had told us: Kaul’s office so mismanaged the response to a key audit on crime victim services that Wisconsin was, for a time, labeled a high-risk grant state, imperiling other grants, such as those that are supposed to help domestic violence and sexual assault victims. Seems like news to us. Of course, the liberal media ignored the story.
Failing crime victims. It doesn’t get much worse than that.
Kaul also made vague statements to the media about the so-called fake electors (his office may or may not be investigating them), even though his office attorney wrote a memo that basically exonerates them. He didn’t clear up a lazy media misimpression that he has the power to charge them, either; he doesn’t.
The Liberal Media
The liberal media in Wisconsin rarely dig anymore (with a few notable exceptions), unless it’s taking potshots at Ron Johnson or Bob Spindell. They don’t follow the money anymore. Maybe it’s because reporters are younger and staffs are scaled back, or maybe it’s the influence of Gannett and new Editor Greg Borowski. Whether it’s boosting “gender-affirming care” (ie irreversible surgeries for minors) or DEI, the liberal media do have their causes.
When conservative media (like us) do their jobs for them, they go into overdrive attempting to laughingly debunk our stories (which never sticks). Instead of, “Tony Evers is really communicating as Warren Spahn? Why won’t he release any of the emails?” Their headlines become, “But Scott Walker did it too (even though they dogged Walker mercilessly over his emails at the time).” But now “Scott Walker did it!” is turned into “What Evers did is no big deal because it’s bipartisan.” Yeah, it’s bipartisan bad. Of course, Walker didn’t use the name of another real person. Then they let Evers get away with lying on TV that anyone who files an open records request can have his emails when his office has already rejected an open records request for his emails.
They even tried to make it sound bad that a lot of paroles are now being deferred, since our coverage a year ago! The horrors! The state has stopped releasing some of the most brutal killers and rapists Wisconsin has ever seen! Rather than just reporting that fact, the media spun the story against the Parole Commission. They want us to feel sorry for killers and rapists, apparently.
The media censored a host of stories about liberal Supreme Court candidate Janet Protasiewicz. You can not convince us that, had conservative Dan Kelly been accused by TWO NAMED sources (including a liberal former restaurant owner with no axe to grind) of using a racial slur to refer to black parents in children’s court cases…that the media would not have covered it. It would have been headlines for days. Instead, the media censored the story.
They also censored accusations (by six people, to differing degrees) that Protasiewicz had physically abused her former elderly husband. Again, had this been Dan Kelly, it would have been war-sized headlines for weeks. Two of the people are eyewitnesses who say they personally witnessed the abuse; the other four are corroborative witnesses who say they heard about it years ago.
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel at least ran a watered-down version of the story; other media, including all television stations, outright censored it. But the MJS wasn’t without its brazen bias; the newspaper even ran a story saying Protasiewicz was considering suing us, and then, when she walked that back at warp speed, they refused to tell readers she had walked it back.
The media censored the case in which Protasiewicz, as a prosecutor, had argued to take two black twins from their elderly grandmother in part because she could not afford a bigger home.
Excuse us for thinking the media felt it was too important for Protasiewicz to win to explore her background, even though she was running on her “values.” Sure Protasiewicz denies these things, but what astonished us about the liberal media is that, in most cases, they refused to even ask.
Instead, some of them turned it into an attack on the reporters who broke the story. The worst offender was the Wisconsin Law Journal’s Steve Schuster. We sent him a lengthy correction list; he couldn’t even get one of our jobs right. He turned the Protasiewicz story into a story about an unverified, unsourced social media screenshot we had never seen before and then tried to use it to smear by implication… the reporters breaking the story. The New York Times even had to run a clarification when they picked up that angle.
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel did not even attend Republican Brad Schimel’s announcement event, where he confirmed he was running for state Supreme Court against Ann Walsh Bradley.
The media boosted the museum’s spending, they boosted the sales tax spending, they boosted the Milwaukee Brewers spending, all while doing almost no investigative research into it. They refused to follow the money and investigate the Child Care Counts daycare funding that Tony Evers has been pushing, even though millions of dollars went to an out-of-state daycare firm funded by Swiss gazillionaires and founded by a famed junk bond king. They showed no interest in the fact some of the daycares getting money handed to them are in affluent areas and have serious abuse violation histories. Move on, nothing to see here!
They censored the information that Josh Kaul doesn’t have the power to charge the so-called fake electors under Wisconsin law. They ignored the significant Obama campaign ties to the UW’s aggressive get-out-the-vote efforts. They ignored the fact the guy accused of bringing a gun to the governor’s office was a Bernie Sanders donor.
The media refused to tell the public that a series of suspects, in unrelated very bad crimes in southeastern Wisconsin, were not in this country legally. They have zero interest in exploring the immigration status of suspects even when they kill American citizens.
They censored the story about Brewers’ owner Mark Attanasio’s family being attacked. Ignored the story about an assistant police chief being accused of ordering foot patrols around his own home.
They probably wouldn’t have found out that Cavalier Johnson’s brother was in a big standoff with police if we didn’t break it, forcing Johnson to comment on it at a press conference.
The Wisconsin media need to go back to the basics. Check the rhetoric. Follow the money. Don’t try to debunk a story just because you didn’t have it first. Maybe try to get it first. Ron Johnson isn’t the only story.
In this hall of shame, we need to single out Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporter Dan Bice. Although he did some good work this year (breaking the story of Evers’ chief of staff allegedly having a relationship with a subordinate, even though his newspaper censored the subordinate’s name and epic email demanding they censor it all), Bice deserves a special mention for the year’s WORST STORY.
That would be the story about Supreme Court candidate Jennifer Dorow’s kid. Bice wrote a very damaging story about Dorow’s kid, even though he has never been arrested nor charged in connection with the fentanyl-related death under scrutiny. He has also never been publicly named a suspect by police. Bice based his reporting on anonymous friends and the deceased man’s father.
Dorow’s adult teenage son is not a public figure, and he certainly wasn’t the candidate. Meanwhile, the actual candidate – Protasiewicz – was treated with kids’ gloves. And they expect us to think they aren’t biased?
The Rock, Mike Zimmerman & Steve Taylor
All the neighbors want is for the Rock to TURN IT DOWN. The sound, that is, that emanates into surrounding residential neighborhoods from the Franklin sports and entertainment establishment.
We went out there and listened for ourselves. We wouldn’t want to live in the neighborhoods behind the Franklin development. One neighbor says his son is kept up on school nights by the relentless noise that emanates from The Rock Sports Complex in Franklin into his bedroom. A retired attorney and his wife say the thumping bass and other sounds are so bad that they schedule visits from family members around game schedules and can’t even watch TV in peace. “It will drive you nuts,” he says.
Instead, neighbors say, developer Mike Zimmerman and his consigliere, County Supervisor Steve Taylor (who you’d think would represent the interests of Franklin residents first), have treated the neighbors with disdain.
Never was this truer than in a closed-door meeting with Franklin’s mayor, which descended into name-calling against the neighbors.
The closed-door “emergency meeting” between representatives of the Rock and top Franklin city officials turned into a secret bash fest against a county supervisor and neighbors who have raised noise concerns, with Supervisor Steve Taylor (who now works for the Rock’s foundation) calling fellow county supervisors “terrorists” and developer Zimmerman labeling valiant Supervisor Patti Logsdon “crazy,” Wisconsin Right Now confirmed from multiple sources.
Taylor even called concerned neighbors “idiots” and “f*ckers” at one point, the sources show. Taylor now serves as the executive director of the Roc Foundation after first pushing for the development as a county supervisor. Yet he was a key player in the emergency meeting despite that point. He even failed to disclose his financial ties to the Rock in his county ethics statement. And Taylor is facing an ethics complaint from Franklin’s former mayor.
Many of these neighbors were there first. They don’t want the Rock destroyed. They just want their quality of life back. They don’t think the sound levels make sense. They’ve been helped by courageous fighters, County Supervisor Patti Logsdon and Alderman Jason Craig, primarily.
Just turn the damn noise down. It shouldn’t be that hard.
Democratic Congressman Mark Pocan
.@RepMarkPocan: "[Oct. 7] was a horrific attack and I think [Israel] has a right to go after Hamas, but 4,500 kids are clearly not Hamas. A third of the buildings in northern Gaza being demolished or destroyed is not about going specifically after Hamas." pic.twitter.com/EJN6r24UzK
— The Mehdi Hasan Show (@MehdiHasanShow) November 13, 2023
The intemperate and clownish congressman is wrong on everything (even Hamas!) when he’s not wasting time calling people names and trolling a former Navy Seal on X.
BLM
The official Chicago chapter of Black Lives Matter released a graphic of a Hamas paraglider with the text: "I stand with Palestine." A unit of Hamas militants used paragliders and hang gliders to launch their armed massacre of civilians in southern Israel. BLM, like Antifa, has… pic.twitter.com/ATN2d4sAcf
— Andy Ngo (@MrAndyNgo) October 10, 2023
All it took was one vile pro-Hamas graphic of paragliders for people to FINALLY see BLM for what it is.
A destructive force and a grift. It just has a clever slogan that people were afraid to oppose. But its warped policies (no police! No accountability! No incarceration! Legalize hard drugs!) have cost black lives.
Bud Light
KID ROCK REACTION IS HOW EVERY PATRIOT FEELS ABOUT BUD LITE. pic.twitter.com/ftLC1bqeDj
— Graham Allen (@GrahamAllen_1) April 4, 2023
Kid Rock shot at their beer cans. Enough said. Marketing 101: How to destroy a beloved brand overnight by completely misunderstanding your audience.
Second place, Disney.
Third place: Target.
Wisconsin Hospitals Who Are Mutilating Minors
It’s not gender-affirming care, it’s the mutilation of minors. Shame on the hospitals in Wisconsin that are cutting off the breasts of juveniles and pumping them with irreversible hormones, when European countries are going in the other direction.
More than 260 juveniles received puberty blockers or hormone therapy in recent years from two major Wisconsin hospitals, and up to 15 juveniles underwent breast surgeries every year – in most cases mastectomies – because of “gender dysphoria,” Wisconsin Right Now has documented.
In fact, the numbers are likely much higher because one major hospital, UW Health, only provided a current snapshot of patients being treated, not an annual total. The youngest age was 10 for puberty blockers, 16 for hormone therapies, and 15 for breast surgeries at Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin.
Marshfield Clinic has treated minors with puberty blockers and hormone therapies in recent years because of gender dysphoria, some as young as 14 years old, Wisconsin Right Now has documented through a former employee and a blog post from the hospital.
Read all of our stories on this issue here.
Sun Prairie School District
The Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty (WILL) demanded answers and action from Sun Prairie Area School District (SPASD) after an 18-year-old naked student allegedly exposed his male genitalia to four freshman girls in the school shower at Sun Prairie East High School.
The Sun Prairie School District has now admitted that an incident involving a transgender student in a school locker room violated its “district practices” and “should not have happened,” acknowledging that “it did” occur.
But that’s not all.
A lawyer representing the Sun Prairie School District sent a cease-and-desist letter to a local mother, demanding that she stop her “persistent questioning of District curriculum” after she emailed Creekside Elementary School Principal Kyle Walsh concerns about a book on transgender issues that he recorded himself reading for elementary school students.
Equity bike lanes
We drove the insane new “advisory bike lane” road on Edgewood Drive, which spans the border of Shorewood and Milwaukee, and barely survived! According to the Village of Shorewood, it’s “a lane configuration new to the Milwaukee area.”
It was basically a game of Frogger, as cars had to pull over so others could pass incoming traffic. It appears to be an effort to provide “preferential” space to bicycles instead of cars. And it’s a recipe for disaster. The Milwaukee media are dubbing the plan “bicycle-friendly streets.”
Brilliant plan in a city full of reckless drivers. What could go wrong?
Wauwatosa’s Jim Archambo & Melissa Weiss
Wauwatosa officials, namely City Administrator Jim Archambo and Deputy City Administrator Melissa Weiss, became international laughingstocks when Weiss sent an email to city workers suggesting they not use red and green Christmas decorations in City Hall counter displays because SOMEONE MIGHT BE OFFENDED. The email immediately leaked to Wisconsin Right Now.
An open records request revealed the only one on record as being offended was the Common Council president, Meagan O’Reilly.
Weiss also famously referred to snowmen as “snow people.” Wouldn’t want to offend anyone.
At warp speed, the officials caved and said, oh never mind, after a national religious freedom group threatened to sue, but they then sneakily decorated the back of city hall in purple and blue lights to represent the Aurora Borealis or something like that. Merry Christmas!
Meanwhile, the police department’s staffing is plummeting amidst a city attack on officers’ healthcare, and a pregnant woman was killed at a Wauwatosa intersection by a reckless driver. Talk about misplaced priorities. Even the White House manages to have green and red Christmas displays, that weird Jill Biden video aside.
Tammy Baldwin
The rap on U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin has always been that she is a craven and chameleon-like politician who switches positions at election time. She counts on the fawning media to give her cover, and normally they do.
Never has Baldwin been more rattled and exposed than she is right now, though, on Hamas and Israel. Reminder: For all her supposed political infallibility, she’s only won before in blue-wave years with big presidential (read Obama) coattails. She doesn’t have that this time.
She can’t get it right. Her record has been weak on Israel, erratic at best.
She was for Obama’s Iranian nuclear deal, and once wrote a gushing letter of support for an Islamic group with alleged links to Hamas, CAIR. For starters. But now she’s become a TikTok trend, hounded by pro-Palestinian protesters throughout the state. She looked like a deer caught in the headlights in one video and, notably, she failed to support or defend Israel as people demanded a ceasefire in a shrill tone.
Guess what? She then caved and is for a ceasefire, which will grow Hamas’s power.
Never has Baldwin been more exposed for who she is.
She’s also awful on the border, trying to remake herself, when in the past she advocated for the release of all transgender illegal immigrants into the country. Yes, you read that right.
And she supports transgender surgeries for minors, which are irreversible.
Read all of our Tammy Baldwin coverage here. The Teflon is cracking, and she’s likely to get a very strong Republican opponent soon, businessman Eric Hovde.
The Four Horsewomen of the Liberal Court’s Apocalypse: Ann Walsh Bradley, Janet ‘They’re Rigged’ Protasiewicz, Rebecca Dallet & Jill Karofsky
The Four Liberal Horsewomen of the Court Apocalypse think they’re big winners, and they’re running around acting like they have a massive mandate to act like a shadow Legislature, but we think they are overplaying their hands and, in the end, that will be their own undoing.
Unfortunately for Wisconsinites, that will come after a lot of damage is done.
They galloped into the china shop leaving wreckage all around them, seizing the chief justice’s power, ousting a respected director of state courts for no reason, and then replacing him with a legally dicey hire. The discord on the court has never been worse, but they don’t seem to care about the state Constitution, decorum, or the historically non-partisan role of the judiciary.
Their first big kick at the can – overturning the legislative redistricting maps – was an exercise in rank hypocrisy. They found so-called “municipal islands” unconstitutional, when three of the four (Ann Walsh Bradley, Rebecca Dallet and Jill Karofsky) had found them constitutional shortly before. They did this so they could have two unelected out-of-state consultants redraw the maps for “partisan impact,” which means they want to game it for Democrats. This is even though the case should have been tossed on a series of procedural issues, as well as the merits. And it’s even though the state Constitution gives the power of redistricting to the elected Legislature.
The Legislature has accused them of constitutional due process violations because of the rushed-through timeline.
But they just don’t care. They are doing extraordinary damage to a key institution.
In addition, the swing vote, Protasiewicz, blatantly prejudged the redistricting case, saying the maps were rigged while pocketing $10 million from Democrats in a disgraceful campaign run by a guy who worked for years to get the Republican maps overturned.
Something is very rotten in the state of Denmark, and they haven’t even gotten their claws on Act 10 yet.
We have to give a special mention to Ann Walsh Bradley, who, for good measure, was the lone vote on the court in 2023 to invalidate the victims’ rights amendment, Marsy’s Law.
She would have invalidated the votes of more than 1.1 million Wisconsinites who authorized the sweeping victims’ rights amendment because she doesn’t believe the language alerted voters that it would also harm criminal defendants’ rights. Former Attorney General Brad Schimel is now running against Walsh Bradley.
Some readers think we should have included Dan Kelly on this list. It’s true he cost the state TWO Supreme Court seats. That’s quite a feat. He wouldn’t take the gloves off against Protasiewicz.
The ‘Election Deniers’
We don’t mean “election deniers” in the way the liberal media mean it. We’re talking about the Democrats who think saving Democracy means that:
- You arrest your political opponent four times.
- You engage in sham prosecutions based on novel legal theories and ignore the statute of limitations.
- You gag your political opponent.
- You try to seize your political opponent’s businesses.
- You try to drain your political opponent’s campaign funds with sham prosecutions.
- You criminalize legal strategy and go after attorney-client privilege.
- You ban him from social media platforms.
- You rush the timeline so that he will be sitting in court during key primary elections.
- You arrest and charge his closest associates to pressure them.
Then you count on the media to normalize this.
When all of that fails, and he’s still leading in the polls, you try to kick him off the ballot, denying a free and fair election to millions of Americans.
And then you say you’re doing this because he’s the threat to Democracy.
The prosecutors, judges, and officials engaged in this banana-republic lawfare are losers of the year for the exceptional damage they are doing to American institutions and Americans’ belief in free and fair elections. We’re talking about Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, the Democratic appointees on the Colorado Supreme Court, Fulton County DA Fani Willis, Jack Smith, and more.
Kirk Bangstad
Kirk Bangstad, owner of the Minocqua Brewing Co., alleges a provision of the 14th Amendment disqualifies Trump from holding office. https://t.co/iL9KYDnFVw
— JSOnline – NewsWatch (@js_newswatch) December 28, 2023
The Minocqua Brewery guy has had a terrible year, but he’s still at it, causing havoc and hogging headlines.
He’s trying to get Wisconsin to kick Donald Trump off the ballot because, you know, Democracy requires banning voters from choosing the candidate they want. The deadlocked Wisconsin Election Commission promptly rejected his complaint.
He filed a petition to basically invalidate the school choice program because, you know, Democracy requires banning parents from putting their kids in the schools they want. Even the crazed liberals on the Wisconsin Supreme Court promptly rejected that.
An Oneida County zoning committee in August revoked his business permit over zoning issues, albeit then gave him an extension. Plus, he sells “Biden Beer” and “Evers Ale.”
Anti-Semites
If you can’t say – unequivocally – that the brutal rape and murders of women, children, and men, because they are Jewish, is wrong, then you are worse than a loser. You’re an anti-Semite. You don’t get to say “but…” about Oct. 7, and not be an anti-Semite. There is no “but.”
We never thought we would see the day when blatant anti-Semitism was being tolerated on major university campuses and trafficked by Democratic politicians.
The Democratic Party is on the wrong side of this debate, and history will judge politicians poorly who don’t recognize Israel should be able to defend itself. We shudder to think what they would have said about bin Laden after 9/11. First, they turned on the first responders…
The Collins Agreement
The reckless driving epidemic in Milwaukee has been fueled by the Collins Agreement, costing lives, including many black lives. Yet the media refuse to explore this question.
City leaders, who refuse to re-examine this disastrous settlement, have blood on their hands. Since the settlement, proactive policing – traffic enforcement, field interviews – has plummeted in Milwaukee. And reckless driving has exploded.
Read our investigative piece on the Collins Agreement here.
DEI & Defund the Police
Liberal ideologies are being discredited at warp speed.
DEI took a hit. Yes, it will reincarnate itself in the UW System, under a different name. But in the end, Robin Vos got a bunch of Evers’ appointees on the Board of Regents to flip on DEI.
One-third of the UW’s DEI positions will be moved to general student success (the horrors!) and the positions are being frozen.
We’re for more diversity in the UW, but we are far from convinced creating six-figure administrative positions is the way to do it. The way to do it is by lowering the cost of college for all students by, you guessed it, cutting administrative bloat. Shame on the Regents who voted the wrong way on that (and on Evers for supporting them).
UW-Madison hasn’t gotten it completely right in its defense of Jewish students on campus either.
The Wisconsin Institute of Law and Liberty also had a field day this year filing legal demands and lawsuits about crazy, racist DEI provisions in various school districts and local governments.
And then there’s the failed ideology of “defund the police.”
No one is willing to be for this publicly anymore, even the craziest liberals. Speaker Robin Vos convinced Milwaukee officials to preserve staffing levels in a decimated MPD, which is down 26% in sworn officers since the mid-1990s.
A welcome reprieve for our guys and gals in blue.
That wacky state training board needs to change its policy making it hard for part-time cops to move to a new job, though.
The Village of Big Bend
The clown show Big Bend Village Board has made an absolute mess of its Police Department, which tragically lost its chief and has now seen a mass exodus of officers.
At issue is whether to disband the police department against the wishes of some residents. Big Bend officer James Soneberg stormed out of a crazy village board meeting, saying, “I am tired of the harassment of this village Board and all the crap that I’ve been dealing with throughout the years.”
Another officer, Nate Schweitzer, who is leaving, told The Waukesha Freeman, “The most important thing anyone should know is that the Village Board is 100% to blame for everything that occurred with the police department in the past few months. Ask any of these officers why they are leaving, and they will tell you the board.”
“This Village Board is insufferable and most importantly, non-functional. Each of the past several board meetings has included angry mobs, finger-pointing, name-calling, threats, and little to no action. The board has totally lost control,” Schweitzer said to the Freeman.
Specifically, he named Board member Larry Long and Jeff Goodman.
Jill Underly
When she wasn’t whipping out breathlessly partisan press releases, Underly was trying to convince the world that she couldn’t stream into a big Board of Regents meeting because she didn’t have working internet in Europe. Yeah, okay. We went to Italy this summer, and we had internet on our phone.
She hired Janet Protasiewicz’s former campaign strategist to a pricey position in DPI. Sachin Chheda is a well-known liberal political operative.
Four Republican state senators and representatives from Waukesha County called out Underly for “political activism that does not belong in our schools” and undermining “local control.”
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