Wednesday, February 12, 2025
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Wednesday, February 12, 2025

Milwaukee Press Club 'Excellence in Wisconsin Journalism' 2020 & 2021 Award Winners

Mike Thurston Would ‘Invite Democrats’ to Train Waukesha Co. DA’s Office on Election Integrity

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This is story 3 in WRN’s 7-part series on the Waukesha County District Attorney’s race, based on the recent DA debate sponsored by the Republican Party of Waukesha County. Read parts 1 and 2 here and here.

Waukesha County District Attorney candidate Mike Thurston said during a June 19 debate that, if elected, he would invite Democrats to train prosecutors in the DA’s office on election integrity matters, a plan his opponent Lesli Boese called “silliness.”

Thurston said he would also invite Republican experts.

“This wouldn’t just be a Republican thing,” Thurston, a deputy DA in the office, said. “I’d invite Democrats too. They could come in. They could train us.” He didn’t name the experts who would get his invitations.

The idea of bringing Democrats in to train Waukesha prosecutors on election integrity generated a sharp rebuttal from his opponent in the race, Deputy DA Lesli Boese.

“This county needs a conservative candidate to run this office – that’s the bottom line. I am that candidate,” said Boese, who also hammered Thurston for five donations he made to Democratic DA John Chisholm, as well as other Democrats.

“Mr. Thurston says he wants to, for election integrity, he wants to bring in Democrats to help. Is it because of all the experience that they have without election integrity? That’s silliness,” she added. “We don’t need politicians to come in and tell us how to follow the rules. That’s called the rule of law. You read the statute; you apply the statute to what’s going on in the community. We don’t need people to guide us. We have the statutes to guide us.”

Currently, the elected DA, Sue Opper, handles election integrity cases, but Thurston also said he wants to change that. He proposed “taking the elected out of this,” meaning on election integrity cases. Boese slammed him for that position too.

“The DA is the elected official. We should make that call; the buck stops with me,” Boese said.

What both candidates agreed on is that election integrity matters.

“Election integrity is about a fair system, and if we don’t have that, we’ve got nothing,” Thurston stressed.

Both candidates were asked whether they would commit to enforcing election integrity during the district attorney debate on June 19. Both said yes. How they’d do it is where they differed. Their answers presented one of the sharpest contrasts in the entire debate, which was sponsored by the Waukesha County GOP. Mike Thurston and Lesli Boese are both deputy DAs in the Waukesha County office. Both are career prosecutors who are running as Republicans in the Aug. 13 primary.

What Else Mike Thurston Said on Election Integrity

Mike thurston
Mike thurston

Thurston said he equates election integrity cases to “domestic violence intimidation” cases, whereby a jailed offender starts to intimidate a victim out of wanting the case prosecuted.

“That’s what election integrity is; it’s an attack on our system of justice,” he said. “If we don’t have fair elections, we’ve got nothing.”

Thurston said that, currently, Opper handles all of the election integrity cases that come to the office. “It’s true I don’t have a lot of knowledge how to prosecute and investigate election integrity cases,” Thurston said, calling them “dearly, dearly important.”

He said elected DAs are “worried about being elected,” and he called for a specialized prosecutor position to be created in the office to handle election integrity cases instead and who “gets trained.”

“We have election integrity experts; why aren’t we relying on that?” he asked. “I’m happy to learn.” He said, “I would bring those experts into our office.”

He proposed the same for the Waukesha County Sheriff’s Department, calling it “our biggest dog in the community” and asked, “Why don’t we have a detective devoted to that?” He said there should be both a specialized prosecutor and detective who “know how to handle these cases.”

What Else Lesli Boese Said About Election Integrity

Leslie boese
Lesli boese

Boese said she has worked on an election integrity case before in the office and showed leadership on it. “I agree with Mr. Thurston that that is important,” she said of election integrity.

“In terms of having a special prosecutor, I strongly disagree,” she said. “The DA should have the special training,” she said.

She reiterated that she disagreed with Thurston’s position that the “elected person should be out of it.” Boese also said the Sheriff’s Department already has an investigator who works with the office on such cases.

She also said the “process can not be political.”

“We can not use what has been done in recent years, can not use prosecutors who abuse their power, and we can not use that to try to affect the elections,” she said, mentioning that “we saw that in the last six months. Democrats, Republicans, it does not matter. Everyone needs to play fair. We need to have reliable results in those elections.”

Boese said there needs to be training “before the ballot is put into the machine” to “make sure the person casting the ballot is a legitimate person and to make sure those ballots are filled out by legitimate voters. Those are the two areas we need to focus on that’s been a problem with election integrity in the United States.”

Boese said that, during elections one year, half of the DA’s office staff “went to the polls to see if there would be problems.” She said this should happen again. “That would be very effective,” she said.

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Trump to Stop U.S. Production of Pennies

President Donald Trump said late Sunday that he has ordered the U.S. Treasury Department to stop producing pennies.

Pennies famously cost more than a penny to produce, putting them in the crosshairs of Trump and DOGE’s government efficiency push.

"For far too long the United States has minted pennies which literally cost us more than 2 cents," Trump wrote on TruthSocial, his social media site. "This is so wasteful! I have instructed my Secretary of the US Treasury to stop producing new pennies.

Let's rip the waste out of our great nations budget, even if it's a penny at a time," Trump added.

DOGE posted on X last month critical of the penny’s cost, hinting at its fate.

"The penny costs over 3 cents to make and cost US taxpayers over $179 million in FY2023," DOGE wrote on X. "The Mint produced over 4.5 billion pennies in FY2023, around 40% of the 11.4 billion coins for circulation produced. Penny (or 3 cents!) for your thoughts."

According to the U.S. Mint’s latest report, the cost of all coins is on the rise. From the Mint’s 2024 report:

"FY 2024 unit costs increased for all circulating denominations compared to last year. The penny’s unit cost increased 20.2 percent, the nickel’s unit cost increased by 19.4 percent, the dime’s unit cost increased by 8.7 percent, and the quarter-dollar’s unit cost increased by 26.2 percent. The unit cost for pennies (3.69 cents) and nickels (13.78 cents) remained above face value for the 19th consecutive fiscal year."

Lake Sturgeon Protection

Wisconsin Lawmakers Want State Exempt From Any Lake Sturgeon Protection

(The Center Square) – A group of Wisconsin lawmakers have filed legislation to protect sturgeon spearing in the state.

The bill would exempt Wisconsin from any listing of lake sturgeon under the federal Endangered Species Act.

The group, including Republican Congressmen Glenn Grothman and Mike Gallagher filed what they called the Sturgeon Protected and Exempt from Absurd Regulations Act.

Reps. Tony Wied, Grothman and Tom Tiffany introduced the legislation on Friday.

The bill is in response to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service conducting a status assessment of lake sturgeon after the group was sued by an animal rights group in 2018 attempting to have lake sturgeon listed as threatened.

“Sturgeon-spearing is crucial to maintaining Wisconsin’s lake sturgeon population which is why we must take proactive steps to ensure that we are exempt from any action to list the lake sturgeon under the Endangered Species Act,” Tiffany said about the bill. “Wisconsin is a global leader in sturgeon management, and the SPEAR Act will protect this unique and long-standing tradition for years to come.”

https://www.govinfo.gov/app/details/BILLS-118hr7037ih

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said it will not add the lake sturgeon to the endangered species list last year.

A bipartisan group of Wisconsin lawmakers sent a letter to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in December 2023 pointing out the impact a listing could have on Wisconsin and how the state has worked to manage the lake sturgeon population.

The letter was signed by Gallagher and Grothman along with Sens. Ron Johnson and Tammy Baldwin and U.S. Reps. Bryan Steil, Tiffany, Scott Fitzgerald and Derrick Van Orden.

“Wisconsin does not list lake sturgeon endangered nor threatened in state waters, and has in place a sturgeon program considered a world model for effective management and recovery, and as such should be exempt from any Federal ESA listing of the species”, said Dr. Ron Bruch, former Chief of Fisheries and Leader of the statewide Sturgeon Management Team for the WI Department of Natural Resources.

dpi wisconsin

Wisconsin Republicans Call for Transparency, Fairness in School Referendums

(The Center Square) – A pair of Wisconsin legislators are pushing for more transparency in the school referendum process in the state.

The proposal comes after 169 out of 241 school ballot referenda in 2024 elections were approved by voters at a cost of $4.4 billion to taxpayers.

Sen. Rachael Cabral-Guevara, R-Appleton, and Rep. Scott Allen, R-Waukesha, proposed bills that would require local governments and school boards to include information on the ballot about how much the difference in taxes would for a median-valued home in the community resulting from the referendum.

“Referendums are opportunities for voters to make important decisions about how their tax dollars should be spent,” Allen said. “Good decision making requires transparency in the information provided to voters.”

A second bill would protect school districts from losing state funding when other districts go to referendum.

“It was a shock to many to learn that the massive school referendum passed in Milwaukee would take away vital state funding from over 300 other school districts,” Allen said. “It’s only fair that large referendums in one district should not negatively affect other school districts.”

A Legislative Fiscal Bureau report last year analyzed by Badger Institute showed that a $252 million Milwaukee referendum would cost Madison, Waukesha and Racine $2 million a year in state funding while Appleton and West Bend would lose more than $1 million each year.

The impact is due to tax base equalization, which means that “a school district's property tax rate does not depend on the property tax base of the district, but rather on the level of expenditures.”

The bill states that any school referendum of over $50 million dollars should be paid for by the district that votes for the referendum instead of taking away money from shared school funding.

Tammy Baldwin Supports Transgender Children Surgeries

Trump Order Forces Many Medical Providers to End Transgender Procedures on Children

Late last month, President Donald Trump signed an executive order restricting “transgender” procedures on youth, including puberty blockers and surgeries such as mastectomies and penile reconstruction. In response, many medical providers including some of the top in the nation for performing them have announced they will comply with the EO.

The EO states that “it is the policy of the United States that it will not fund, sponsor, promote, assist, or support the so-called 'transition' of a child from one sex to another, and it will rigorously enforce all laws that prohibit or limit these destructive and life-altering procedures.”

Last year, nonprofit Do No Harm unveiled a database reporting that between 2019-2023, there were 13,000 gender reassignment procedures performed throughout the nation on minors; those procedures included both surgeries and prescriptions. Among the top states in the nation for those procedures was Ohio, which has since enacted legislation banning such procedures.

The Center Square reached out to more than two dozen medical providers throughout the country based on data provided by Do No Harm regarding their total billing, prescriptions, and surgeries performed, asking them how they planned to respond to Trump’s EO.

Among those to announce they were suspending all procedures was Seattle-based UW Medicine, which stated in an email that it was “committed to supporting the clinical care needs and well-being of all our patients, as well as complying with state and federal law. We are currently in compliance and are also continuing to provide our full spectrum of services.”

Seattle Children’s Hospital ranked among the top in the nation for puberty blocker prescriptions; though it did not respond to request for comment, there have been reports that it has suspended those services, and its webpage for gender affirmation surgery has since been removed.

MultiCare Mary Bridge Children's Hospital located in Tacoma wrote in an email that while it does not perform gender-affirming surgeries, “we are aware of the executive order that calls for an end to gender-affirming medical treatments for children and adolescents under 19 and are continuing to monitor the situation. Executive orders are directives to federal agencies on how they will operate. Much of what’s been issued has not yet become rules for us to evaluate.”

D.C.-based Children’s National Hospital released a statement that it will no longer prescribe puberty blockers or hormone therapy, noting that prior to the EO it did not perform gender affirming surgeries.

Coolie Dickinson Hospital based out of Massachusetts wrote in an email that it “is reviewing to see what, if any, actual impact the executive orders might have and would follow up, if there is any impact. In the meantime, the care we provide to our community continues as normal at this time.”

University of Michigan Health stated that its “teams are assessing the potential impact of this executive order on our healthcare services and the communities we serve. Our priority remains delivering high-quality, accessible care to our patients while ensuring compliance with the law."

Another medical provider to cease gender transition services for anyone under 19 is VCU Health and Children’s Hospital of Richmond, Virginia, which wrote in a statement that it was “in response to an Executive Order issued by the White House on January 28, 2025, and related state guidance received by VCU on January 30, 2025. Our doors remain open to all patients and their families for screening, counseling, mental health care and all other health care needs.”

UCSF’s Gender Affirming Care in San Francisco has also ended services for patients under 19, a policy also adopted by Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles.

Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York simply wrote in an email that “we will keep you posted once we have an update on this matter.”

Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children's Hospital of Chicago and the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia both said they were reviewing their services.

Several hospitals and hospital systems who performed these procedures on minors did not respond to The Center Square's requests for comment on the executive order. The Center Square will continue to seek clarification on whether they plan to comply with the order.

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Bill Would Limit Which Flags Can Fly at Wisconsin Government Buildings

(The Center Square) – A new Wisconsin bill would limit government-sponsored divisions from flying certain flags.

The bill prevents flags other than the U.S. flag, Wisconsin flag, local flags and U.S. armed forces and POW/MIA flags from being flown or hung outside any state or local institution.

The bill was introduced by a group of Republicans including Rep. Jerry L. O’Connor, R-Fond du Lac, Dave Murphy, R- Greenville, Rob Brooks, R-Saukville, Joy Goeben, R-Hobart and State Sens. Dan Feyen, R-Fond du Lac, and Cory Tomczyk, R-Mosinee.

The bill points to particular flags that have led to divisiveness including those of political movements or social causes, such as MAGA, pride, heterosexual, CSA, Second Amendment rights, BLM, ALL Lives Matter, Antifa, Pro-Life, Pro-Choice and others.

The bill doesn’t prohibit any private citizens or Native American tribes from flying any flags.

“Government should not be in the business of choosing sides, or even giving the appearance of choosing sides,” said Feyen. “This bill simply ensures that the first impression of all government buildings and institutions is neutral, offering equal treatment to all Wisconsinites.”

The lawmakers said that they were asked to act on the divisiveness by Wisconsin residents.

“Flags on government buildings are not supposed to be divisive and should not support one ideology over another,” said Sen. Tomczyk, “When the governor uses flags flown over the State Capitol and other taxpayer-funded buildings to divide the people of Wisconsin, it is shameful and frankly, embarrassing. It is time to end this nonsense.”

Illegal Border Crossings Buses Carrying Migrants Northern Border Illegal Border Crossers Immigration Parole Illegal Immigrant Convicts Biden’s Immigration Policies

Republican Bill Would Block Illegal Immigrants From Receiving Tax Breaks

Immigrants residing illegally within the U.S. could no longer receive child tax credits or tax breaks for low income earners if the Safeguarding American Workers’ Benefits Act becomes law.

Reintroduced by Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, R-Miss., the legislation would require both parents and children to have Social Security numbers that are valid for employment in order to claim the Child Tax Credit or the Earned Income Tax Credit.

Rep. Clay Higgins, R-La., has introduced a companion bill in the House.

The U.S. Joint Committee on Taxation estimates Hyde-Smith's legislation could save nearly $28 billion over ten years.

“I welcome President [Donald] Trump’s intent to target wasteful spending and enforce immigration laws,” Hyde-Smith said Tuesday. “The environment is certainly friendlier now to adopt legislation that saves billions of dollars and ensures that only U.S citizens and persons authorized to work can benefit from the Child Tax Credit and Earned Income Tax Credit.”

While the CTC and EITC should only go to those with SSNs valid for employment, certain loopholes allow some people who do not meet the requirements to receive the federal benefits. The bill would close those loopholes.

Only weeks into Trump’s second presidency, Republicans and the Commander in Chief have already implemented or introduced other anti-illegal immigration measures, including reinstating the Remain in Mexico policy and authorizing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to round up and deport migrants residing in the U.S.

The Safeguarding American Workers’ Benefits Act is also part of Republicans’ federal cost-cutting efforts to finance the extension of Trump’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which the Congressional Budget Office estimates will cost $4.6 trillion over the next ten years.

“I will work to ensure that [the] Safeguarding American Workers’ Benefits Act is considered as part of the debate to extend and improve on the Trump tax cuts that expire this year,” Hyde-Smith said.

Riley Gaines

Nearly 80% of Americans Don’t Want Men Playing in Women’s Sports

Surveying nearly an equal number of Republicans and Democrats, a poll taken by the New York Times and polling company Ipsos showed that the majority of Americans do not want transgender-identifying men in women’s sports.

Of those surveyed, 79% answered that men “should not” compete in women’s sports when posed with the following question: “thinking about transgender female athletes – meaning athletes who were male at birth but who currently identify as female – do you think they should or should not be allowed to compete in women's sports?”

This number has increased from a 2023 The Center Square Voters' Voice Poll that reported 67% of American voters were collectively against men playing in women’s sports.

When the 2025 New York Times-Ipsos poll is broken up along political divides, 94% of Republicans, 67% of Democrats, and 64% of Independents or “something else” answered that men should not be in women’s sports.

The highest bracket that believes men should be allowed to play in women’s sports are Democrats, equaling 31%.

The results of this poll came just before President Trump declared there are only two sexes in America, male and female. The survey was taken from Jan. 2 to 11.

When reached for comment, Ipsos vice president for public affairs Mallory Newall repeated the question posed to respondents and said “we cannot speculate on what people meant or interpreted beyond the wording of the question.”

Ipsos is a global market research and polling company, according to its description in the poll document.

Men in women’s sports has become an issue in recent years, with high school girls such as Payton McNabb getting injured by a male competitor on a volleyball team and former University of Kentucky swimmer Riley Gaines becoming an activist defending women's-only sports after placing second to a transgender female swimming competitor.

The Independent Women’s Forum senior legal advisor Beth Parlato told The Center Square that “without female-only athletics, the safety of girls and women is endangered, and men will dominate the playing field, which unfairly takes away awards, opportunities, scholarships and roster spots.”

The Independent Women’s Forum (IWF) is a nonprofit women’s organization “dedicated to developing and advancing policies” that “enhance people’s freedom, opportunities, and well-being,” according to its website. IWF has taken a staunch stance against men competing in women’s sports.

“Males and females possess unique and immutable biological differences,” Parlato said. “With respect to sports, males have biological athletic advantages over females, as the average male is stronger, bigger and faster.

“Furthermore, allowing males in female-only spaces is an invasion of a women’s right to privacy and threatens women’s safety and well-being,” Parlato said.

“Defining sex-based terms in law and policy is essential to protect women’s sports and spaces,” Parlato said.

Trump’s executive order on two sexes provides “needed clarity to preserve the legal existence of women as distinct from men,” Parlato said. “Protect women’s sports bills at both the federal and state levels must be codified into law to ensure equal athletic opportunities for women and girls."

The NYT-Ipsos survey was “of the American general population” aged 18 and up, interviewing a total of 2,128 people; 1,022 of those polled were Republican/Lean Republican, 1,025 were Democrat/Lean Democrat, and 81 were Independent or “something else.”

In a vein similar to transgender-identifying men playing in women’s sports, the poll showed that the majority of Americans are not for sex changes in minors, either.

Respondents were asked “thinking about medications used for transgender care, do you think doctors should be able to prescribe puberty-blocking drugs or hormone therapy to minors between the ages of 10 and 18?”

A total of 71% of Americans do not think anyone under 18 should have access to such drugs or therapy.

Shortly after this poll, Trump signed an executive order “restricting transgender drugs and surgeries for minors,” The Center Square previously reported.