Not one more taxpayer dime for Vos's 1st Amendment contempt

The last time the breezily arrogant Speaker Vos thumbed his nose at taxpayers and flipped off the First Amendment for Twitter manipulations it cost taxpayers $200,000 to settle the lawsuit he lost.

The Journal Sentinel is reporting that Vos is at it again.

Speaker Vos puts limits on who can respond to tweets despite First Amendment ruling against him

I say, not another dime of public money for repeating this behavior. 

Vos needs to pay the inevitable legal fees and settlement costs himself. No more buying his way out of self-inflicted legal troubles with money three-card-montied from those hard-working taxpayers he and his party always laud when it's campaign commercial filming time.

Maybe he can gerrymander the legislature and pick his own district's voters

but he shouldn't be allowed to pick more money from our wallets.

Foxconn to hire 10,000 workers, but...

In Vietnam, not Wisconsin:

Foxconn gets green light for $270M factory in Vietnam

Foxconn is set to build a new factory to produce tablets and computers in Vietnam, which could be part of Apple's plan to widen its iPad and MacBook production lines outside of China....This will not be Foxconn's first foray in Vietnamese production, with it having already invested $1.5 billion in the country so far....including the recruitment of 10,000 local workers.

Hmm...where have we seen that number before? Oh, on Feb. 2-3, 2019, here:

Now Foxconn's chairmen Terry Gou is saying after discussing the project with Donald Trump that it's projected Wisconsin workforce of 13,000 employees will hire far more engineers than blue collar workers:

"Foxconn plans to hire more than 10,000 engineers to do research and development," he said. 

And how's that going? 

* You be the judge:

Behind-the-scene report details Foxconn's failure to live up to its promise in Wisconsin

The company spent two years exploring ideas to generate revenue such as fish farming with water piped in from Lake Michigan, exporting ice cream and storing boats. In addition, golf carts were purchased to retrofit into autonomous vehicles that would cart in employees, but the idea never reached fruition.

“As the divisions bickered, bored employees would come down from the Milwaukee headquarters to race the carts around the empty building, until the batteries finally died,” the Verge reported. 

* And:

Walker-Trump Foxconn world wonder to flounder for years

And while there have been reports about ventilators, masks, server components and airport coffee kiosks in various stages of planning or production there, there are no big flat panel devices being made in Foxconn's now-completed-but scaled-back main building which is what the whole deal was based on.

Which is why the company's relatively few hires didn't quality in 2019 for any of the whopping state tax credits which Walker and the Legislature had quickly approved.

* But wait, there's more:

Foxconn not expect to meet hiring goals in next 3 years  

The Department of Administration’s projection came in its budget request for the fiscal years 2022 and 2023.  

Hundreds of additional posts and links, here: 

* Promises, promises: 

With state $, Lake Michigan water, Foxconn sending super suburban sprawl to once-bucolic Mt. Pleasant

Foxconn promotional video suggests Versailles is coming to Mt. Pleasant. Or is it DisneyWorld? 

 

WI health official Palm heads to DC; Tiffany, et al, outsmarted.

Two thoughts about Andrae Palm's promotion into the Biden administration. 

Wisconsin's top health official, who has thus far led the state's response to the COVID-19 crisis, is poised to leave her post Wednesday to join President-elect Joe Biden's administration. 

1. Good for her flight over the cuckoo's nest.

2. And good that Wisconsin's rightwing politicians - who did nothing but grovel before Trump while they his administration failed their basic pandemic-fighting obligations - did not manage to fire Palm after repeatedly smearing her through inflammatory rhetoric, and also now-US Representative

Tom Tiffany's special brand of garbage:

"Wisconsin's economy and health care system are collapsing. Small businesses are closing their doors for good. Tens of thousands of people are struggling to apply for unemployment in an attempt to survive the storm she caused.

"New data shows us how we can make a targeted response to the Wuhan virus, but Ms. Palm will hear none of it. A native New Yorker, ally of Hillary Clinton's, and Washington, D.C. insider, Ms. Palm understands very little of our Midwestern values or how her decisions have devastated our way of life.

"Ms. Palm came here as Governor Evers' hired gun, and she will leave with Wisconsin's corpse if she continues."

I'd noted months ago that Wisconsin's leading partisan game-players were undercutting DHS Secretary (designee) Andrea Palm by withholding her Cabinet-level confirmation.

Note this July, 2019 posting: 

WI GOP legislators use cheesehead McConnellism to further de-legitimize Evers

How much bowing, bending and scraping must take place in front of these self-important, per-diem subsidized and generously salaried legislators before they behave like adult public servants and less like bratty students who have decided to throw paper airplanes at the substitute teacher...

When Republicans were in charge across-the-board, "certainty" was gospel.

Now it's just another GOP norm tossed away in favor of tacky tactics and raw partisanship, like fiscal conservatism and local control, until the GOP can restore what it had come to see as the biggest norm of them all - - Republican domination for their own careers and special interest donors in all three branches of government.

A final thought: As Bruce Murphy made clear on Urban Milwaukee, it was the Legislature's leadership of Fitzgerald and Vos - and not only the GOP's most whacked-out caucus members - who led the campaign against Palm as part of a larger effort to discredit Gov. Evers. 

During an historically-brutal viral pandemic.

And Wisconsin's COVID19-death toll now approaching 6,000 which was accelerated by the GOP-led Legislature's extended 2020 do-nothing vacation certainly makes Tiffany's 'Wisconsin's corpse' wisecrack especially loathsome.

Push to reinstate protection for nation's gray wolves

Good to see a coalition of organizations challenging the outgoing Trump administration's heavy-handed, heavily-ideological and science-free removal of endangered species protection 

for the country's gray wolves:

The action was in response to the Jan. 4 delisting of the species by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which allowed state agencies to resume management of wolves, including the possibility for hunting, trapping and other lethal control measures.

Anticipating the federal move, Wisconsin is preparing a state-sanctioned hunt. Some current and recent history that suggests this is a bad idea, and in the wrong hands, is here.

Fast-learning WI Rep. is new DC King of Stupidity Mountain

The mountain in DC is better known as Capitol Hill, and the new King who displaced Louis Gohmert and fellow Badger Glenn Grothman at the top is Wisconsin's newest Republican US Representative Scott Fitzgerald.

Props to his meteoric rise - only four days on the job and he'd already broken his oath of office - after just been promoted to the GOP's US Capitol Insurrectionist Caucus by voters he gerrymandered into his district after years of practicing for this moment by mastering pea-brained-politicking as GOP Majority Leader of the Wisconsin State Senate:

Wisconsin Rep. Fitzgerald not sure Trump to blame for riot

I don’t think we know yet," Fitzgerald said when asked at a virtual WisPolitics.com and Milwaukee Press Club event if Trump was to blame.  

Fitzgerald had his amazingly rapid 

    

breakthrough scaling Stupidity Mountain after being in Congress for a mere 11 days

There are probably Members of Congress who needed more than 11 days to figure out the hallway maps or whether their assigned park places were on North or East Capitol St.

So it's conceivable that Fitzgerald is being mentored by more experienced double-talking Republican truth-deniers like Senior Trump-defender Ron Johnson.

We'll know that for sure if Fitzgerald's investigation finds that either Hunter Biden or sunspots were to blame for last week's fatal Capitol Hill riot.

WI GOP-led Assembly thumbs unmasked nose during wolf hunting hearing

Wisconsin Republicans keep proving they will ignore science when they are legislating meddling in public policy.

Look no farther than their years of denying the realities of climate change or promoting water pollution or substituting ideology or special interest privileges over science when public health and welfare were at stake.

33 times Walker disregarded, dismissed science

So it was not surprising Wednesday that the Republican-run state legislature would again display its primal dedication to power and core contempt for science when it held a public hearing in the era of meeting-via-Zoom without offering Democratic legislators the opportunity to attend remotely...while in-person legislative attendees were free to go without pandemic-blunting face masks. 

Unlike in the Senate, the Assembly isn’t offering lawmakers the option of calling in to meetings or floor sessions remotely, leaving it up to Democrats to either show up and face intermittent mask wearers, or not show up at all.

Mind you, this is the same GOP crew which already had its own in-house COVID19 outbreak that it tried to cover up - and yet they get to set their own rules regardless of known risks because exercising power is more important to them than is exercising good judgment or social consciousness.

I'd refer GOP Assembly Speaker Robin Vos and his caucus to this article, How Masks Can Help Prevent The Spread of COVID-19, but it appears on TheScientist website and we've repeatedly documented what Wisconsin Republicans in the Assembly and elsewhere think of annoying facts and sciency-things like that:

The 10 worst things WI GOP/rightists said & evaded about COVID

The hearing Wednesday was not about COVID19; it  concerned the reintroduction of a state-sanctioned wolf hunt.

And the science-denigrating atmosphere in the room connected back to the GOP-run legislature's state sanctioned wolf-hunting plan that was rushed to adoption in 2012 and avoided science as well as mainstream ethics.

 

The plan was thrown together by legislators with so little regard for science that a judge had to delete the legislators' legalized blessing of hounds in the wolf-chase before it led to a lot dead dogs in the Wisconsin woods.

[Though hunters during bear season get paid handsomely by the state - $845,000 and counting so far - when their hounds chase bears through wolf territory and pay the ultimate and reimbursed price.]

Back to the previous wolf hunt which was the sort of policy you get when the state relied for 'advice' from a hunter-heavy advisory committee which the DNR had stripped of wolf-hunting opponents.

The wolf hunt continued through three hunting seasons characterized by broken kill quotas until a Federal judge stopped grey wolf hunting nationally after 2014, but the way Wisconsin's legislators kept science and good practices from the bill  had not gone unnoticed, as I had written in a blog post several years ago -

...about the politics and realities of Wisconsin's lobby-driven and especially cruel practice (leg traps allowed, along with pursuing hounds), and one of the very early items from July, 2012 is on-point...

While a Journal Sentinel editorial wants the proposed Wisconsin wolf hunt green-lighted with policy outcomes autopsied after the fact, environmental legal advocate Jodi Habush Sinykin makes a good case that the hunt is being hurried to a cruel and sloppy start this fall.

Here was the heart of Sinykin's position, which is echoed in the court ruling Friday:

Rushed through the legislative process with no notice to Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources wildlife experts, no input from the state's Wolf Science Advisory Committee and no tribal consultation, the law prescribes a first hunting season for wolves. The law is drawing significant opposition from scientists, mainstream hunters and conservationists alike, owing to an excessively long, 4½-month season that allows hunting of breeding females and to the array of hunting and trapping methods viewed as out of line with traditional values of fair pursuit and public safety considerations... 

So I find it unsurprising and more than a little ironic that the same Legislature which ignored the pandemic throughout much of 2020 as it infected more than a half-million people in Wisconsin and killed over 5,000  - data here - and had disregarded science the last time it set up a controversial wolf hunt in Wisconsin would re-launch itself back into that science-demanding wildlife issue by thumbing its unmasked nose at COVID science, too.

Delaying Trump's impeachment trial puts more pressure on Ron Johnson

Having the Senate delay - but hold - a Trump impeachment trial following Wednesday's House impeachment action will be a good thing, for four reasons:

* Most importantly, a delay will allow Biden to focus on his forward-looking agenda and implement better responses to the pandemic which Trump obstructed, then botched - even deliberately:

*It will allow more evidence about the attack on the Capitol by Trump devotees to surface that could strengthen the case for a Senate conviction.

Rumors about some officials' collusion with rioters need time to be checked out before Trump's trial, as the facts  could be pivotal:

* A delay allows more time for pressure to build against Trump enablers who'd surely prefer the entire matter evaporate so they wouldn't have to sit in judgement on Trump again.

That would no doubt include Big Lie spreader Ron Johnson; The Lincoln Project and others have already begun that work, and just today Wisconsin Democrats announced an anti-Johnson ad buy.

Think he wants to take another vote on convicting Trump as he considers whether to run again for a third term he'd earlier ruled out?

* And a trial, conviction or not, would absolutely buttress the deterrent effect of the entire impeachment process. Leaving the White House shouldn't come with a Get Out Of Jail Free Card.

Convicting Trump would complete and win the case against him, but would require a two-thirds vote of the Senators present as jurors - a very high bar that would require many Republican Senators' votes.

Additional majority-only votes could then ban Trump from holding federal office and perhaps cost him some benefits and privileges normally extended to former Presidents, but it's a complicated matter that has never before been applied to a former President.

But as Tump would say, 'let's see what happens.'

Everybody knows Trump's alter egos will disappear, too

Bonus benefit of Trump's 

impending departure:

His imaginary friend "Everybody" who made another appearance at a Trump event just today - and has for years, here - along with special occasion twin victim "Everyone"  -

"I know your pain, I know your hurt. We had an election that was stolen from us. It was a landslide election and everyone knows it, especially the other side." - 

will also be exiled with America's Biggest Loser to everyday irrelevance and invisibility at Mar-a-Lago.

So happy trails, everybody, and may you enjoy every one of your upcoming, subpeonas, grand jury appearances, lawsuits and trials - every last one of them. 

Fresh power grant to gerrymandered GOP legislators threatens WI waters

This predictable decision - 

Wisconsin Supreme Court Says Lawmakers Can Intervene In 2 Cases Involving DNR's Authority

- puts the state's water supplies purportedly protected in the constitutionally-created Public Trust Doctrine at grave risk. 

The anti-science Walker and his equally rightist Attorney General Brad Schimel have been voted out of office, but their big business agendas at the people's expense - examples here and here (among many) - are getting fresh life served on a silver platter to gerrymandered and corporately-obeisant GOP legislators by the State Supreme Court.

And because we have known for a long time where those legislators stand, er, bow, I think we can see where this grant of legislative power over water management is likely to lead:

Corporate WI hand-delivers to legislators its water control demands

A pretty stunning memo was sent [in October, 2015] by multiple trade groups and corporate special interests to the State Legislature in advance of today's hearing about the fast-tracked Wisconsin water giveaway bill I wrote about yesterday that puts groundwater and downstream users' access in private hands.

(Hap tip to the Malcontends blog for pulling back the curtain on how bills become law and pointing readers to the memo.)

The bold, hand-delivered memo, its bold-faced language and the weighty array of powerful logos at the top tell the story:

An urgent communication to all Wisconsin legislators 

We are at a crossroads. It is imperative that the legislature assert its authority and bring certainty and sanity to the regulation of new and existing high capacity wells in Wisconsin. 

And..

However, we cannot accept any legislation that would create new, stifling regulations or establish regulatory uncertainty as to how DNR and the state will approach new well applications moving forward. 

Among the coalition's "solutions" - - 

Clarification of the public trust doctrine consistent with the Supreme Court's Rock- Koshkonong decision 

More about that here, but it's clear that what industry wants is primacy over state waters and decisions about who gets it.

Point of disorder: It took Fitz just four days to break his oath

This Wisconsin Public Radio, (WPR), report lays out a crucial seditionist timeline on Insurrection Wednesday:

* First, Wisconsin's senior GOP Senator Ron Johnson paved the way for the Stop the Steal [Sic] crowd by supporting the Trump-inspired-and-amplified-Big Lie-plan to blow up Biden's win by tossing some states' electoral votes as cast.

* Second - and after the rioters had occupied and trashed the Capitol, injured scores of police officers, endangered all members of Congress and left dead bodies behind, WI GOP Reps Tom Tiffany and Scott Fitzgerald - 

Sworn in on January 3rd, caved to insurrectionists on January 6th to serve Trump, lead Senate Trump enabler Ron Johnson, and the mob.

- followed Johnson's lead in subsequent House tallies and voted to give Trump and the rioters what they wanted. 

This is why these anti-American Wisconsin legislators should resign or be expelled from the Congress, as the WPR reported:

U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany, R-Hazelhurst, and U.S. Rep. Scott Fitzgerald, R-Juneau, were among 121 House Republicans who voted to object to counting Biden's electors from Arizona, a vote made possible by several Republican U.S. senators, including Wisconsin U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson. 

Tiffany and Fitzgerald were later among 138 Republicans who voted to object to Biden's Pennsylvania electors.

Their votes came hours after the U.S. Capitol was cleared by law enforcement, and after lawmakers returned to the House and Senate chambers under heavy armed guard.

And yes, the challenges inspired by Johnson and the others in the Senate sedition caucus did fail, and all the electoral votes were counted just as they had been submitted, though Fitzgerald may have set the record with the fastest violation of a Member of Congress's swearing-in-oath.

Especially those parts about swearing and in good faith to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic (like election-subverting Senators and murderous Capitol invaders):

“I, AB, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion, and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.”

 

Lincoln legacy backers target WI GOP Senator where party was founded

One of Trump's most repulsive boasts was his self-serving yet flippant connection to the 'late, great Abe Lincoln.'

A comparison which Trump later downgraded at Lincoln's expense:

Trump suggests Lincoln’s legacy is ‘questionable,’ brags about his own work for Black Americans

But now one of Trump's most loyal Republicans in Wisconsin is learning that a 'not-late/still-great' Lincoln revival is coming his way courtesy of Honest Abe adherents who helped turn the state and nation Joe Biden's way in November.

Why not close that circle where the Republican Party was founded?

Out with the hypocrites, in with the ironies.

Having already stepped away from his two-terms-only pledge - first reported here in 2017 and reprised, for example here in October - and in recent weeks  also abandoned his oath of office, Wisconsin's senior Party of Lincoln [sic] Senator and conspiratorial seditionist Ron Johnson 

may find the biggest obstacle to the third term he said he wouldn't seek is, irony of ironies, a highly-motivated group of fallen-away Party of Lincoln activists dedicated to demolishing the Cult of Trump.

The Lincoln Project.

DEDICATED AMERICANS
PROTECTING DEMOCRACY

The Lincoln Project is holding accountable those who would violate their oaths to the Constitution and would put others before Americans.

And the Lincoln Project added this message to others sent Johnson's way after he undermined the traditional, Constitutionally-mandated counting of states' electoral votes before his 'damage-already-done' CYA change of mind: 

"The campaign against you will be the one you earned with your betrayal and sedition," Lincoln Project founder Steve Schmidt tweeted Sunday. "When we are done you will be an American villain who exceeds even the wretched McCarthy in ignominy."

Make sense, don't you think? That people who revere Lincoln, the union and the Constitution would try and oust a latter-day Joe McCarthy who undermined the union and Constitution for which Lincoln gave his life.

Urban Milwaukee's Bruce Murphy put it all in context:

MURPHY’S LAW

Everyone’s Dumping on Ron Johnson

It’s been a great week for Ron Johnson haters. His attacks on the legal election of Joe Biden have been attacked by Morning Joe, the Lincoln Project and a rare Journal Sentinel editorial.... 

And beyond Johnson’s demagoguery on the presidential election is another issue that also goes to his integrity. He was reelected in 2016 after promising voters he would retire after serving a second term. Now, as the JS editorial noted, “he has the audacity” to consider breaking that promise and run for another term. The media across the state are aware of that promise and might want to remind voters of it.

 

 

After modeling COVID gear, Vos models fake COVID legislating

We've heard a lot from Trumpian Republicans about fake news, but COVID costume model and Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Robin Vos modeled fake legislating this week by touting a COVID 'aid' bill that principally aims to boost GOP power and has zero chance of being signed into law.

This is not the first time we've seen Vos use the language of reasonableness and concern as props that conceal on-the-record motives and agendas:

While in court to stop mask rules, Robin Vos calls to remove politics from COVID response

So we'll let Vos model both the COVID protective get-up he wore earlier to convince you that it was "incredibly safe to go outside" - 

- and the language with which he wrapped his going-nowhere 'COVID' bill that models GOP partisan power game-playing and one-party obfuscation: 

"So, I am very optimistic that everything in here is something that is modeled off of good ideas," he said. "It's modeled off past practice and, in many cases, it's modeled off what other states with divided government have been able to accomplish when they put their nose to the grindstone."

Words, words, words. So many words.

And you can tell what's being modeled is bullish*t when who's selling it - whether new and improved mouthwash or even bigger jumbo shrimp - feels it necessary to repeat a buzzword phrase to camouflage the truth. 

As Vos was doing when he said three times in two sentences that his bill was 'modeled off' other things.

Such as? From where? Suggested by whom, and when, exactly?

And, also he says his bill is 'modeled off of good ideas.' 

Seriously? That's the pitch?

Can't remember a government official touting an important measure with 'everything in here is modeled off of bad ideas.'

And was Vos trying to dress up his grab for partisan control in Wisconsin over COVID policy-making and financing by tapping into all the talk and writing about disease prediction modeling - the real epidemiological tool which experts are using to track and tame the virus?

Man, oh man: talk about a manipulation!

Such slippery rhetoric reminded me of Scott Walker trying to convince veteran Madison reporter Bill Lueders that the sweeping union-busting package known as Act 10 which Walker had just sprung on unsuspecting citizens and legislators modeled only 'modest,' requested changes.

And because he knew that Act 10 was not made up of of 'requests' that were 'modest,' Walker said it twice thinking the repetition would lull Lueders and others into buying it.  

"These are bold political moves, but these are modest, modest requests," Walker asserted, of proposals that would completely strip public employees of their right to collectively bargain for anything except salaries (and to severely limit their ability to do even this), along with sweeping new rules that will make it difficult for their unions to survive. 

A pardon like Nixon's could be Trump's only way out

Reposted from 9/30/2020:

Given sore loser Trump's announcement Friday that he will not attend Biden's January 20th inauguration, and no doubt will be holed up in Mar-a-Lago with the drawbridges pulled up to deter various process-servers and prosecutors, I'm now more convinced that Trump will pardon himself (and more allies and family members, too) to escape the avalanche of federal charges he knows is more of a certainty after the riot he incited this week left at least five people dead and the Capitol defiled.

---------------------------- 

From 9/30/2020.

Two more thoughts after watching the entire Tuesday debate night Presidential self-immolation.

1. It's really too bad Wisconsin voters can't cast a ballot on Nov. 3rd against GOP Senator and key Trump enabler Ron Johnson. Lucky voters in Maine, South Carolina, Kentucky and elsewhere get to punish a Senator who kept excusing Trump and failed to remove him after he was deservedly impeached.

Gerrymandered...and COVID-wracked...(a record virus hospitalization and death toll were reported today, thank you GOP)...and Foxconned Wisconsin sure has earned it. As Trump would say, it is what it is.

2. What came through Trump's uncontrolled self-destructiveness

was fear.

A lot of it.

Fear of a more appealing Biden, who is the tip of the people's spear. 

Fear of humiliation and defeat.

And fear of losing the incumbency's legal protections which he and AG Bill Barr and other administration enablers have stretched and corrupted to fit him for the last four years.

Which is why he's willing to upend absentee voting, crush the Constitution and obliterate what remains of American political normalcy by openly scheming to poison the election and/or remain in office even if Biden is certified the winner. 

And which is why he just might print and play his his own 'Get Out of (Federal) Jail Free' card by resigning and handing things off to VP Pence-the-Pardoner just prior to the January 20th transition with the compliant Pence having made the same kind of deal Richard Nixon made with then Vice-President Gerald Ford in 1974 - resignation in exchange for a full and complete pardon for any and all federal crimes committed - known or yet to have been discovered.

Because if Trump simply heads off on Air Force II to Mar-a-Lago a defeated ex-President, subpoenas and prosecutors from the Justice Department and the Internal Revenue Service (and probably separately from New York State which are beyond the scope of a Presidential pardon) are coming for him, and he knows it.

A pardon would not stop state prosecutions.

A side bonus for Trump: he doesn't have to sit there in the January cold while Biden and Kamala Harris are sworn in and be a witness to his own disgrace.

Does Johnson now think Trump is 'patriot that truly loves America'?

Ron Johnson's enthusiastic and unapologetic Trump enabling has helped bring the country to the brink of disaster.

But its important to understand that Johnson has been living with Trump on the crazy fringe for years.

It was just two months ago - despite Trump outrages from caging kids to shaking down foreign leaders to treating the Presidency like a cash machine - that Johnson sent Trump this memorable valentine which sure didn't age well after Trump's brownshirts on Wednesday overran, defiled, looted and left behind dead bodies at the US Capitol - Johnson's workplace - Wednesday. 

“In the face of coordinated efforts to undermine his administration from day one, and a mainstream media that shed all pretense of fairness, President Trump has tenaciously fought to make America better - and he produced remarkable results. His unbelievably energetic reelection campaign efforts earned him 200,000 more votes in Wisconsin than in 2016 and once again made pollsters look ridiculous. Regardless of the outcome, in my book he will always be a winner and patriot that truly loves America.”

So don't look to Johnson to condemn Trump for inciting the Capitol riot Wednesday, as he's excused Trump's lawbreaking before:

 

As I noted in June:

Trump operates above the law. Ron Johnson helped with that.

As Trump continues to throw the country into repeated and dangerous, pre-election constitutional crises, it's worth revisiting Ron Johnson's blanket blasé excuse-making that kept Trump from being removed after his impeachment. 

Johnson: Finding That Trump Broke Law Not Relevant In Impeachment Trial 

 And here are but a few more Johnson gems:

* Said conservationists who'd criticized him were on "an environmental jihad."

* Did not inform police a staffer had told him she'd been sexually assaulted.

* Said sunspots were causing climate change.

* Said people with pre-existing medical conditions deserved to pay more for health insurance just as auto insurers charge higher premiums to insure cars which have been damage in crashes.

* Said food, health care and shelter were privileges, not rights.

* Said US COVID deaths of 11 million was a tolerable number.

WI GOP's too-little-too-late COVID plan is Power Grab 2.0

After nine months of paid vacation while thousands of Wisconsinites were killed by the coronavirus, Wisconsin GOP legislators are fast-tracking (har!) a package that purportedly seeks to confront the already-rampant virus but in actuality grabs the executive branch's emergency and public health functions - as well as some local jurisdictions' powers, too - - from the incoming Governor Evers whose powers Legislative Republicans with defeated Gov. Walker's assistance began seizing in late 2018 even before Evers was sworn in.

Let's be clear: The GOP package is not made up of science-based-best-practices-disease-fighting-public-policy-buttressing measures.

It is a purely partisan power move to puff up the gerrymandered GOP caucus while mocking people who have contracted the virus, or who lost their jobs to it or watched over a video hookup as relatives took a last, COVID19 choked breath in the presence of overworked frontline medical staffers whose well-being has been also been disregarded by GOP malfeasance, too.

All you need to know about these Republican charlatans is that Speaker Vos told the public it was "incredibly safe" to go stand in line for April in-person voting while he was draped in protective gear - 

- and GOP State Senator Van Wanggaard said in October that he opposed the kind of science-backed virus-restraining masking order which Republicans had been opposing for months even if the Wisconsin coronavirus caseload increased ten-fold.

You've heard of virus super-spreaders. Meet a Wisconsin stupid-spreader.

Does he sound like the kind of 'leader' you want in charge of safe schooling, medical supply funding, vaccination distribution and other elements of the so-called GOP virus-fighting package?

I'm glad to see organizing against the GOP move by the League of Progressive Seniors :

Urgent Message: Stop Assembly Speaker Robin Vos from taking control of COVID policies, federal money and vaccine distribution!

During 2020, Vos closed down the legislature and did nothing to protect the state while almost 5,000 people died. He filed a series of lawsuits to stop the Governor from preventing the spread of COVID. In December, Governor Evers and the State Assembly developed a joint plan to fight COVID using new federal aid and the vaccine supplies. Now, Assembly Speaker Robin Vos dumped the joint plan and introduced his own bill, taking power over the whole process of fighting the pandemic. He is pushing it through the legislature as fast as possible.   Today is the “public“ hearing for the Vos bill, and the vote in the Assembly is Thursday. His bill gives the Assembly – where Vos has maximum power – control over: local governments efforts to address the pandemic. school districts ability to respond to COVID. how to spend funds coming from the federal government. how to distribute the vaccine.

Click here to download a Report on the Vos's Failure to fight Covid in 2020 and the details of his plan.

Look to Gov. Evers to veto this do-nothing-but-grab-power package that has been belatedly cobbled together by the state's leading AWOL COVID coddlers.

Links to Van Wanggaard's remarks and other WI GOP intentional public health obstruction during the pandemic are in a December post, here.

A guide to WI's right-wing COVID-coddling

Soon this singularly awful year will be over and optimism about COVID19 vaccines - along with flat-out, coast-to-coast exhaustion - could dull the memory of what we've gone through.

So I want to gather examples of what some Wisconsin right-wing politicians and officials actually did and said while everyday citizens with less power and fewer resources were - and continue to be - overwhelmed, sickened, impoverished and killed by COVID19.

This updates a similar item posted November 9th.

Ron Johnson can hold Homeland Security Comm. hearing....

 ...and call his culpable self as a witness before the committee he chairs to examine today's insurrection 

that blocked the constitutionally-mandated counting of electoral votes in the US Capitol against which he has conspired. 

U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin will join 10 other Republican senators and object to certifying Electoral College results during Wednesday's joint session of Congress, despite no evidence of widespread voter fraud.

GOP continues to leave Wisconsin waters contaminated and unsafe

People in groundwater-contaminated Wisconsin from Kewaunee County to the Central Sands Counties and further south and west near the Iowa border can be excused for yelling at their computer screens if they saw this report the other day.

Experts: Nitrate Water Contamination Is Now a Public Health Threat  

If you’re based in Wisconsin, you might want to inquire into the source of your drinking water. Much of the state’s water supply appears to be contaminated with nitrates, naturally occurring ions that can pose a risk to human health when consumed in concentrations that exceed—or, it turns out, even meet—federal standards. The October study that revealed the extent of the problem was published in the journal Environmental Monitoring and Assessment.1

  

“High levels of nitrates in a human body can cause respiratory problems, particularly in babies with ‘blue baby syndrome,' reproductive complications for women, and have been connected to several types of cancer, including colorectal cancer and kidney cancer,” [researcher Chloe] Wardropper says. 

Seriously - now? 

Let's work back through just some of the record.

* I cited Minnesota media in 2018 which reported nitrate contamination in Wisconsin groundwater had these known consequences as reported by Wisconsin Watch in 2015:

Nitrate in water widespread, current rules no match for it 

Born a month early in the spring of 1999, Case 8 had been thriving on formula. But at three weeks old, when her family ran out of bottled water and started using boiled water from the household well at the dairy farm where they lived, she got sick....Two days after she fell ill with methaemoglobinaemia, or “blue baby syndrome,” water tests turned up the most likely culprit — high levels of nitrate. 

According to state estimates, nitrate is at unsafe levels in an estimated 94,000 Wisconsin households. One in five wells in heavily agricultural areas is now too polluted with nitrate for safe drinking, according to data from the state Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection. 

 * As I said, 'now?' It's daily living in the aforementioned Central Sands and to the east in Kewaunee County, as I reported, in 2018, here.

WI Central Sands the next Flint? Kewaunee County already soaks up that honor.

* And take it from long-time Kewaunee County clean groundwater activist Nancy Utesch: 

We in Kewaunee County share a commonality with Juneau County residents who are being poisoned through agricultural practices. 

We asked the US Environmental Protection Agency for an investigation into the cause and source of well water contamination in our 2014 Safe Drinking Water Act petition, but the EPA has yet to address it. 

Central Sands has the Wysocki CAFO. We have 16 CAFOs. 

Wisconsin should long ago have stopped acting confused as to the cause and source of known, widespread contamination and moved instead to protect Kewaunee County residents and water resources of people statewide. 

Manure flowing from a Kewaunee CAFO

While we are elated over the attention being focused by the grassroots work of our Central Sands comrades, we are baffled by the lack of response to two infant hospitalizations in 2004 and 2014, respectively, and to persistent water borne illnesses regularly documented at our local health department. 

The EPA’s Region 5 in Chicago said on September 19, 2018 that Kewaunee’s 16 CAFOs, porous karst topography and costs were all factors delaying its response to our 2014 petition, but those are not valid reasons to delay an investigation and solutions for years.

Instead, the EPA’s grotesque neglect is failing to protect the health of Wisconsin citizens from known pollution threats posed by a growing industry which the EPA and the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources should be credibly regulating.

When will the US EPA region 5 and our Wisconsin DNR do real investigations into the causes and sources of Kewaunee’s water contamination? And enforce solutions in the public interest?

What will it take? 

Without real investigations, will we ever know the full extent and costs from the illness and suffering resulting from agribusiness here? 

Why has it taken this long?

We have waited long enough.

I know that the Wisconsin DNR is working hard after eight years of Walker-era budget cuts and industry favors like this one - 

Dairy group uses behind-the-scenes influence with Gov. Scott Walker to shift regulation of large livestock farms

- to repair the damage.

Waterway pollution in WI skyrockets during Walker, GOP reign

....the cumulative numbers in these [official, DNR biannual] reports which encompass most of Walker's tenure show the addition of 804 newly listed polluted waterways to the "more than 700" cited in 2012. The additions, 804, outpaced deletions, 96, by a ratio of more than eight-to-one, and leaves Walker with about double what he inherited.... 

And, yes, I read about the formation of a new broad-based initiative that is dedicated to action. 

Four environmental and agricultural groups are coming together to advocate for meaningful state-level policy changes that support clean water and resilient farms. 

Clean Wisconsin, the Dairy Business Association, The Nature Conservancy in Wisconsin, and Wisconsin Land and Water Conservation Association announced the partnership today at a virtual press conference.

This is a good step to be sure, and I applaud the veteran environmental groups like Clean Wisconsin which has been at this for 50 years and worked so diligently to guarantee clean water to every Wisconsin resident.  

The obstacle is that corporately-compliant GOP legislators hold on to their gerrymandered majorities - and the rural dominance it guarantees - leaving groundwater continually impaired statewide.

* You can read about GOP leaders' preferences - in their own documents words - here:

Vos, Fitzgerald go to bat for 'existing and expanding CAFO operations'

* And here: 

Farm siting rules likely heading back to drawing board after pushback from GOP, farm groups

* So realities like this openly punitive and partisan disregard for healthy drinking water - 

Yes, GOP did oppose $40 million for lead pipe replacement because it helped Milwaukee too much

- and another 2019 GOP power move will remain automatic:

Wisconsin budget committee signs off on new dairy hub, nixes fee increases for large-scale farms 

Evers’ plan would have increased the $345 annual fee to $660 yearly. On top of that, it would have required CAFO owners to pay $3,270 to operate the farm, a payment that would also have to be made every five years thereafter for permit reissuance. 

As will deliberate moves like this very recent action by Republican legislators that upended years of disclosures, study, negotiations, and, finally some legislating - about yet another danger in the groundwater: 

Legislative committee strips key language from rules to prevent PFAS contamination 

Democrats accused the committee of “neutering” the state’s first law aimed at curbing PFAS contamination, while the committee’s GOP leaders agreed with industry groups who argued the DNR overstepped its authority. 

Reminds me of Walker's intervention during his first few hours in office in January, 2011 on behalf of a business rather than public water policy:

A bill proposed this week by Gov. Scott Walker to sidestep a Department of Natural Resources' review of a wetland at a Green Bay-area retail project is drawing sharp criticism from environmentalists while also signaling his willingness to use his powers to advance his economic agenda. 

The legislation would allow a developer to fill a small wetland for a retail sporting goods store at Highway 41 and Lombardi Ave.

Did I mention that the developer was a Walker donor? 

As is the developer of a privately-owned golf course on freshly-annexed-and-pristine land in Sheboygan which would absorb state park land, and where land use and wetlands permits are being litigated?

More analysis, here.

A further mind-boggling insult is that the Wisconsin DNR remains joined with the developer in a lawsuit that seeks to bar citizens (opponents of the plan have created "Friends of the Black River Forest"- FBRF) from challenging the land: 

DNR and Kohler Company fight residents' right to challenge a state agency's actions

So basically the state - that's the people, you and I - is arguing that the people can be barred from contesting the disposition of public land which is there for the people's use -  than 400,000 annually, according to recent DNR records - and which, in this case, is park land literally within a stone's throw of the people who have filed a legal contest. 

You get the picture - the big one in which clean water is too often in the background - and in Wisconsin Walker-era pro-polluter polices are sticking around and being  imitated and worsened by design during the Trump years 

EPA rule change removes federal protections from large swath of waters and wetlands

Remember the Wisconsin public trust doctrine which predates statehood?

Like the wetlands which the Walker-led Legislature gifted to Foxconn at the public's expense, it's draining away, too.

Foxconn flood muddied Robin Vos' Twitter feed, too

* Mud, flood, water pollution, fake 'blight,' eminent domain and now a second local credit rating downgrade; what else is on the agenda at this Saturday's annual Mount Pleasant Day 2018?

Muddied landscape, fiscal picture could frame Mount Pleasant Day 2018 on Saturday

* Lessons learned: Images, activism pay off. Corporate P.R., not so much.

Floodwaters poured downstream from Foxconn to mainstream media; 3 takeaways

* Residents want answers, action in wake of predictable 'Lake Foxconn runoff in flood-prone Racine County.

Mt. Pleasant residents want answers, action after Foxconn site runoff.

*  As predicted, heavy rains in SE WI have led to flooding off the Foxconn site and into the Pike River.

See the flood runoff from the Foxconn site. Heads up, downstream!!