It's assessment time, as WI is hard hit by COVID & drunkenness, too

It will surprise no one that the Tavern League of Wisconsin instantly got a judge in far northwestern Sawyer County to suspend Gov. Evers' COVID-19-prevention order limiting capacity in bars and other other gathering spots.

After all, the organization had earlier filed a brief in support of litigation brought by GOP legislative leaders in the spring which led to the State Supreme Court killing an extension of Gov. Evers's 'Safer-at-Home' order, noted here.

It's worth noting that geography and minimal population density have spared Sawyer County much of COVID-19's grim realities which have swamped Wisconsin statewide.

The entire county has less than 17,000 people - that's equal to one-third the residents in a single City of Milwaukee Common Council district - and up-to-date data for Sawyer County show only 288 positive virus cases there and a single death while the state's COVID-19 tallies show more than 164,000 positive cases and 1,500 fatalities.

In fact, the same data show that Wisconsin reported 33 COVID-19 deaths reported today, Wednesday - two more than the 31 people who died in the crash of Midwest Express 105 in Milwaukee 35 years ago, and that tragedy led the news for weeks. 

And if Wisconsin's calamitous COVID-19 body count remains on its current deadly path - something AWOL Republican legislative leaders care less about it than how Donald Trump's polling is going here - Wisconsin will keep setting more COVID-19 records and the number 33 will be insignificant and forgotten.

Too harsh a judgement? Remember that Racine County GOP State Senator Van Wanggaard recently said the state's ballooning COVID-19 data could explode by a factor of ten and he still wouldn't support a masking order.

Pesky experts who have spent decades studying how killer viruses spread and recommending simple public health methods to combat them have pointed to bars as especially risky places to hang out in a pandemic.

But the same incautious mentality that has kept a first-time drunken driving offense at the traffic ticket level in a state historically damaged by alcohol abuse is tying the hands of Wisconsin officials who are trying to slow down the COVID-19 rampage which GOP enablers have helped keep the Badger State among the hottest of the country's virus hotspots.

And it's been this way for months, as Urban Milwaukee noted in July!

Wisconsin’s COVID-19 reproductive rate, the number of people expected to be newly infected from a single confirmed case, is now the worst in the nation.

As Wisconsin keeps setting new Badger State records for daily COVID-19 caseloads and deaths, I noticed the other day that the moderate Republican and AM620 radio talk show host Steven Scafiddi - the former Mayor of Oak Creek, so with a public service background - had noted the overlap between Wisconsin communities with spiking COVID-19 cases and a national list of America's drunkest cities.

WTMJ AM radio show host Stephen Scaffidi

@WTMJSteve

on October 12 put the COVID-19 and the drunken cities lists together in a Tweet:

Eerily close to the 12 Wisconsin cities that make the top 20 drunkest cities in America.

Quote Tweet

Journal Sentinel

@journalsentinel

· Oct 12

Wisconsin now has 10 of the top 20 metro areas with the highest infection rates in the country. https://jsonline.com/story/news/2020/10/12/wisconsin-coronavirus-state-reports-nearly-2-000-new-cases-9-deaths/5970999002/

Here are the lists Scafiddi had referenced:

*The Journal Sentinel's report that there are ten Wisconsin metro areas on a list of the nation's 20 leading COVID-19 hotspots:

Wisconsin now has 10 of the top 20 metro areas with the highest infection rates in the country, according to an analysis by The New York Times. Those areas are Oshkosh-Neenah, Appleton, Green Bay, Sheboygan, Manitowoc, Wausau-Weston, Marinette, Beaver Dam, Fond du Lac and Platteville, the analysis shows.

*The 2019 list of the top 20 US drunkest cities, and there's Wisconsin with 12 of the top 20 spots: 

1. Appleton, Wis.
2. Oshkosh/Neenah, Wis.
3. Green Bay, Wis.
4. Madison, Wis.
5. Fargo, N.D.
6. La Crosse/Onalaska, Wis.
7. Fond du Lac, Wis.
8. Ames, Iowa
9. Eau Claire, Wis.
10. Mankato/North Mankato, Minn.
11. Wausau, Wis.
12. Sheboygan, Wis.
13. Missoula, Mont.
14. Grand Forks, N.D.
15. Racine, Wis.
16. Janesville/Beloit, Wis.
17. Milwaukee/Waukesha/West Allis, Wis.
18. Lincoln, Neb.
19. Iowa City, Iowa
20. Corvallis, Ore. 

 I noted a similar drunken cities' list in 2017:

Nothing to boast about: 

Seven Wisconsin cities are within the top ten of a list of the drunkest cities in America. Ten Wisconsin cities are on the top 20 list.

24/7 Wall St.’s Drunkest Cities in America list puts Green Bay at the top, followed by Eau Claire at No. 2, Appleton at No. 3, Madison at No. 4, Oshkosh at No. 6, Wausau at No. 9, La Crosse at No. 10, Fond du Lac at No. 12, Sheboygan at No. 15 and Milwaukee at No. 20.

Also referenced here, with related items: 

Alcohol-related deaths a factor in WI life expectancy decline

And this post was additionally relevant: 

Wisconsin not focused on drinking problems, steep health ranking decline 

I hope more policy-and-opinion-makers look further into whether the spread of COVID-19 in Wisconsin is related to what we know as the 'drinking culture' here.

How State's Drinking Culture Developed Here

I can't think of a more qualified expert on such matters to lead a COVID-Contamination-Culture probe than WI GOP Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, since he was the first legislator who said cultural practices by certain people were spreading the disease in his home County of Racine. 

In secret recording, Vos says immigrant 'culture' was to blame for COVID-19 outbreak in Racine County

Final thoughts: 

This is how you do public policy in a pandemic:

* Have a Mayor like Tom Barrett who is leading on COVID safety rather than putting special interests above public health.

* Helping organize free flu shots and COVID-19 tests at the same time, since the cold-weather flu season will likely push COVID sickness and death numbers into the stratosphere.

Record-breaking data mute RoJo's whistle past COVID's graveyard

I've updated this Oct. 12 posting because on Oct. 13 WI reported a COVID death toll of 34 and record-breaking positive case tallies, too: Oct. 13.

Wisconsin sets records again for COVID-19 deaths, cases

---------------------------------------------

October 12, 2020: Though COVID-19 has killed more than 215,000 Americans and almost 1,500 of his constituents, the latest empathy-free verbal hairball Ron Johnson just coughed up is only the latest act in his reliably callous routine:

Ron Johnson: COVID-19 'is not a death sentence'

Johnson, a Republican, said that while there have been "so many tragedies" for those who test positive, "at the same time, COVID is not a death sentence." Johnson said he was last tested for the virus on Oct. 5 and again tested positive, but "I have never had a symptom, ever."

So in RoJo World, people shouldn't fear dying from COVID-19 because he caught the virus and it hasn't given him even a sniffle. 

Which makes him even tougher than Dear Leader Donald Trump. 

What a role model. 

What a man!

Out-of-state readers may be shocked at his words, or that he is Wisconsin's senior senator, and chairman of the Senate Homeland Security committee where he's busied himself with pro-Trump partisan sideshows while a pandemic ravages the homeland.

But Wisconsinites will not be surprised because this is the same science-dismissing 'leader' cut from Tail-Gunner Joe McCarthy's ragged cloth, and who voted against COVID-19 relief funding, and who said people have no right to health insurance and who also opined on the record that 11 million COVID-19 deaths in America might be the price we should pay for easier access to haircuts and tap beers.

With his latest pronouncement, we can award Johnson The Worst Wisconsin Senator Since Joe McCarthy, Or Ever trophy and its companion Face of The Stupid Party plaque, and retire them both.

Hey, he tested positive and didn't come down with any symptoms, so the rest of you who may be worried you're next, or who know anyone whom COVID-19 killed: fuggedaboutit.

GOP State Senator in COVID-weary WI has Pee-Wee Herman moment

Take a moment out of another COVID-complicated day made more dangerous by GOP death cultists who believe the virus is no big deal - and even mock it - and absorb the latest on-the-record-self-inflicted wound by a GOP Wisconsin state legislator.

It happened when Republican Saukville State Senator Duey Stroebel 

criticized a judicial ruling Monday affirming Governor Evers' emergency powers: 

Republican Sen. Duey Stroebel of Saukville said COVID-19 rules were better left to local governments than the state. 

"Believe me, there are not a lot of geniuses" in state government, Stroebel said.

I am afraid that's what we call going full-on Pee-Wee Herman.

'I know you are but what am I?"

A few hours later, a packed indoor Trump campaign event in Menomonee Falls on Monday where best pandemic-preventing-practices were ignored gave us a glimpse into what a local government's COVID-19 control measures looked like in the conservative Waukesha County Village of Menomonee Falls.

And don't be thrown by the 'village' designation, as Menomonee Falls is a significant jurisdiction:

Menomonee Falls is a village in Waukesha County, Wisconsin, United States, and is part of the Greater Milwaukee area. The population was 35,626 at the 2010 census, making it the most populous village in Wisconsin. It is the fourth largest community in Waukesha County.Wikipedia

And we'd already seen public health measures openly ignored in Winnebago County, so how surprising is it that the virus is raging there, as was reported four days ago in a Journal Sentinel story about a popular local bar owner's battle with COVID-19:

[Mark] Schultz, 64, is the co-owner of Oblio's, a bar in Oshkosh that is beloved by a city that now has the highest rate of COVID-19 infection in the country, according to a New York Times analysis.

Again, not surprising, because numerous local law enforcement agencies statewide said they won't enforce the Governor's masking order, as reported here, here, and more instances, here:

The Walworth County sheriff said, the office "will not be responding to complaints of individuals suspected of violating the governor’s mandate, nor take any direct law enforcement action as it relates specifically to the governor’s face covering mandate...

Stroebel's remark takes its place in the Wisconsin GOP's pantheon of pandemic self-parodies, including fresh statements by two GOP state legislators which downplayed the pandemic's severity:

...state Sen. Howard Marklein told his southwestern Wisconsin constituents that hospitals were not overrun and there was no correlation between a rising number of infections and hospitalizations or deaths. That day, a hospital in northeastern Wisconsin had to treat people in hallways because it was so overwhelmed with COVID-19 patients.

This trend began in April when State GOP Assembly Speaker Robin Vos said it was "incredibly safe" to go outdoors before he appeared in layers of anti-COVID protective gear. 

His buffoonery was followed some time later in the pandemic when GOP State Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald was reported on August 3rd to have justified his opposition to the Governor's masking order this way: 

"I think things are going well right now, people are complying if they want to."

On that day when Fitzgerald was whistling cheerily past the state's COVID graveyards, Wisconsin had already reported 949 COVID deaths and 55,000 positive cases and the case tally in 'incredibly safe...going well' Wisconsin has ballooned to more than 160,000, data show.

One WI image Monday explains Trump Team's ease with COVID transmission

Here's a one-picture-is-worth-the-thousand words needed to illustrate the Republican Party's failed response to the Covid-19 pandemic from the White House to COVID-wracked-swing state Wisconsin.

I see little mask-wearing and zero social distancing during a Trump campaign rally in a bowling alley Monday in Menominee Falls, an upscale suburb in deep-red Waukesha County.

Meanwhile, Wisconsin with spiking cases remains a COVID-19 hotspot, and 22 minutes south by car from the bowling alley, the State of Wisconsin is activating an emergency hospital built into a State Fairground exhibit hall because COVID outbreaks have overwhelmed hospitals in Northern Wisconsin. 

Flouting best pandemic-prevention procedures only spreads the disease. 

I know people know better after seven months and more than 215,000 deaths nationally, and especially in hard-hit Wisconsin where nearly 1,500 have died and ICUs are filing up again - but poisonous partisanship is repeatedly and cavalierly displayed by selfish red hat devotees to prove that we are not all in this together.

Waiting for Ron ("Lucky") Johnson's 'raise-the-dead' COVID plan

I've updated this Oct. 12 posting because WI reported a COVID death toll of 34, and positive case tally today.

---------------------------------------------

Though COVID-19 has killed more than 215,000 Americans and almost 1,500 of his constituents, the latest empathy-free verbal hairball Ron Johnson just coughed up is only the latest act in his reliably callous routine:

Ron Johnson: COVID-19 'is not a death sentence'

Johnson, a Republican, said that while there have been "so many tragedies" for those who test positive, "at the same time, COVID is not a death sentence." Johnson said he was last tested for the virus on Oct. 5 and again tested positive, but "I have never had a symptom, ever."

So in RoJo World, people shouldn't fear dying from COVID-19 because he caught the virus and it hasn't given him even a sniffle. 

Which makes him even tougher than Dear Leader Donald Trump. 

What a role model. 

What a man!

Out-of-state readers may be shocked at his words, or that he is Wisconsin's senior senator, and chairman of the Senate Homeland Security committee where he's busied himself with pro-Trump partisan sideshows while a pandemic ravages the homeland.

But Wisconsinites will not be surprised because this is the same science-dismissing 'leader' cut from Tail-Gunner Joe McCarthy's ragged cloth, and who voted against COVID-19 relief funding, and who said people have no right to health insurance and who also opined on the record that 11 million COVID-19 deaths in America might be the price we should pay for easier access to haircuts and tap beers.

With his latest pronouncement, we can award Johnson The Worst Wisconsin Senator Since Joe McCarthy, Or Ever trophy and its companion Face of The Stupid Party plaque, and retire them both.

Hey, he tested positive and didn't come down with any symptoms, so the rest of you who may be worried you're next, or who know anyone whom COVID-19 killed: fuggedaboutit.

WI denies Foxconn tax credits until work matches a contract

You could see this coming a mile away because useful as they are, ventilators and perhaps airport coffee dispensing machines are not the flat-panel electronic products which Foxconn and its leading misleader Scott Walker - and others - 

 

had pledged were coming to Racine County:

State says Foxconn cannot receive billions in tax credits until new contract is drafted

Along with the blue-collar boom and thousands of high-paying jobs which Trump said was coming to Racine County? 

Three years ago, Taiwan-based electronics giant Foxconn was lured to the Milwaukee suburbs by former Gov. Scott Walker, a Republican, and his GOP allies, with $4 billion in tax breaks.

In return, Foxconn promised to hire 13,000 people, the bulk of whom would work in a factory assembling high-tech liquid crystal display screens at a new plant in the town of Mt. Pleasant. 

Happy to add today's bid for accountability and truth by Wisconsin's not-Walkerite leadership to my nearly 40-month long Foxconn archive: 

[Updated continuously from June, 2017] This 380+ post archive tracks, explains and provides context for Wisconsin's publicly-awarded environmental favors, legal privileges and $4.5 billion in state and local funds to subsidize and assist Taiwan-based Foxconn. 

Call it a Scott Walker - - and failed campaign manuever - - production.

From NBC Nightly News, 7/21/19

 

Evers mask order upheld; GOP's pre-election evasion ploy fails

I went to a management workshop years ago where the facilitator closed with this summation of successful leadership: "Don't let other people make their problems your problems."

Which is exactly what a judge in northwestern Wisconsin said in effect Monday to Wisconsin's do-nothing GOP legislators when he refused on their behalf to overturn Gov. Evers' mask order.

"The legislature can end the state of emergency at any time, but so far, it has declined to do so. As the statewide representative body of the citizens of Wisconsin, the legislature’s inaction is relevant and it weighs against judicial intervention, especially when the requested intervention will have statewide impact," Waterman wrote.

I'd looked at the case last week, here.

Unwilling to play errand boy for the accountability-ducking duo of Vos and Fitzgerald - 

 - St. Croix County Circuit Court Judge R. Michael Waterman - a Walker appointee - told GOP legislators who joined the case through a taxpayer-funded legal brief they could have convened anytime to kill the Governor Evers' emergency moves.

Amazing that the same ol' boys - 

- who'd been grabbing power from the Governor for the last two years when it suited their ideological agendas - some examples, here - and who openly wished they had broken off more for themselves while they were at it - had to be reminded by a judge that they already had the power to do with Evers' mask order what they hoped the judiciary would step in and do for them. 

Of course, debating the Governor's masking policy in a public legislative session - remember those quaint events of yore? - and then voting to overturn it  - otherwise known as 'doing your job,' or 'taking responsibility' or displaying the 'courage [sic] of your convictions [sic, LOL] - would also mean opposing a common sense and science-based proven practice that has broad public support because people know wearing a mask might keep others off a ventilator and their grandparents alive.

Everyday people who, unlike state legislators, have been able to acquire this knowledge while managing work and kids and stress about money and fear of disease from home for the same 180 days during which Vos and Fitzgerald enjoyed full taxpayer salaries and benefits and campaign schedules of their choosing.

So the question is for GOP leaders who have have been kicked to the curb in a courtroom where their judge-shopped case got punted because you can't always control such outcomes:

Will these same one-dimensional partisan cowards dare come back into public session before the election - of course well-protected by Zoom, or further swathed inside their chambers by hypocrisy and all the protective personal equipment good money can buy -

- and overturn the Governor's mask order?

In the face of catastrophic data that highlights our state's high-profile COVID-19 hot spot status?

Or will they continue to follow a pathogen-ridden and partisan playbook which prefers griping and sniping until the election is over when they can't be held accountable by the voters?

Stay tuned.

Walker showed Trump how to be a science and expertise abuser

Add public health and science - 

The White House has repeatedly meddled with decisions by career professionals at the FDA, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other science-based agencies. Many of the nation’s leading scientists, including some of the top doctors in the administration, are deeply disturbed by the collision of politics and science and bemoan its effects on public health.

-  to environmental damage, voting suppression and other harmful policies Trump apparently picked up from the wrecking ball and expertise abuser known as Scott Walker.

Walker's 8-year attack on Wisconsin's environment. Part 18. The 33 times science was dissed, dismissed.

 

There personnel and policy connections between Teams Walker, Schimel and Trump.

In fact, Trump named Walker's long-time DNR Secretary and climate science foe Cathy Stepp to two senior USEPA positions and Stepp's former DNR Deputy Kurt Thiede replaced Stepp earlier this year as Trump's US EPA Great Lakes director when she finally retired. 

Details, here.