More disrespect heaped on Wisconsin minorities by the GOP

Because it happens in Wisconsin so often, I take the time to memorialize the racism and related insensitivities displayed by certain Republicans who hold public office, at public expense and at the expense of public civility.

Which brings me to last week's 'charade put on by GOP Assembly members chosen by Speaker Robin Vos where they pretended to address issues of racial justice while deliberately never setting foot in Milwaukee, the state's largest city, where people of color are in the majority and no doubt would have packed a public hearing and given GOP legislators a deserved earfull:

'Dog & pony show': Milwaukee Black activists scoff at Task Force bypassing Wisconsin’s Blackest city in creating police reform 

[Milwaukee activist Kamila] Ahmed’s point of view was struck down during the first public hearing on these bills at the Committee on Criminal Justice and Public Safety....So she took her time, during the public hearing section, to voice those demands and why they should be included in the bills being discussed.

However, Chair John Spiros abruptly cut her off.

“This has nothing to do with the bills,” Spiros said. “You’re giving demands that this committee doesn’t need to listen to. What we need to do, is get back to the bill.”

“The demands from the people, we are asking you as legislators, whatever else, to listen to the people. We have marched in the streets”

“We’re adjourned,” Spiros said, slamming the gavel before Ahmed could finish.

Now I'll be honest with you; I'd never heard of the aforementioned GOP State Rep. John Spiros -

Marshfield GOP State Rep. John Spiros

- (and where might he have learned to the quick gavel that stifles debate when it threatens to bring out inconvenient facts and truths?) - so I Googled "Spiros and black and race" to see if there was any history to be found, and this is what popped up: 

Marshfield City Council member Rebecca Spiros criticized for 'tone deaf' Facebook post about race 

MARSHFIELD - City Council member Rebecca Spiros is facing criticism for comments she made in a Facebook post about race. 

Spiros, who represents Marshfield's District 8, questioned in the post whether people could still order black coffee, say "black olives" or if a black crayon should be renamed. 

In the post, Spiros, who is married to State Rep. John Spiros (R-Marshfield), asked whether those questions have legitimacy in a country that considers the children's television show "PAW Patrol" to be offensive. 

Granted, the sins of family members can't be affixed to kith and kin, and Council member Spiros did offer an apology of sorts - 

"'I want to be clear that I represent only myself on my page and while I had intended to put out a message about the over-stretch of political correctness my message was poorly phrased and perceived by some as something other than what I had intended," Spiros said...'"

Her ugly remarks and subsequent clarification reminded me of another ignorant and gratuitous slam by a presumably-educated adult Republican politician who had a smear at the ready:

GOP candidate, Rebecca Kleefisch, in Wisconsin: Sorry for comparing gay marriage to marrying a dog  

...at what point are we going to OK marrying inanimate objects? Can I marry this table, or this, you know, clock? Can we marry dogs? This is ridiculous." 

After being slammed by gay rights organizations and bloggers who recently turned up the interview from earlier in the year, the 35-year-old apologized on Thursday.  

"My comments were meant to relay my concern with redefining marriage," Kleefisch said in the statement, according to The Associated Press. "I never intended to sound insensitive, and have the utmost respect for all people. I apologize for my poor choice of words."

But again, I am stunned at the willingness of so many Wisconsin Republicans and conservative officeholders to so easily and routinely speak and behave publicly with so much arrogance and so little tolerance, empathy and common courtesy.  

 

Unhealthy air over much of E. WI through Sunday p.m.

Before you head outdoors today in these 16 counties this weekend... 

Advisory for Ozone (Orange) Start Date/Time: Saturday, June 5 - 10 am CDT End Date/Time: Sunday, June 6 - 11 pm CDT Counties: Kenosha, Racine, Walworth, Milwaukee, Waukesha, Ozaukee, Washington, Sheboygan, Fond du Lac, Manitowoc, Calumet, Kewaunee, Brown, Door, Oconto, & Marinette Comments: The air quality index is expected to reach the UNHEALTHY FOR SENSITIVE GROUPS level. Sensitive groups, including children, elderly people, individuals with respiratory and cardiac problems, and anyone engaged in strenuous outdoor activities for a prolonged period of time, should avoid extended outdoor exposure. Details about this advisory are available on the Wisconsin Air Quality Monitoring Data site. Air Quality Index Chart Learn more about the Air Quality Index (AQI) on the AirNow website. More Information DNR Air Quality DNR Air Program Contacts Do a little, save a lot!

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EPA rolls back smog increases linked to Scotts Walker & Pruitt

Just as a WI DNR smog alert for these Wisconsin counties expired Thursday evening - 

Kenosha, Racine, Walworth, Milwaukee, Waukesha, Jefferson, Ozaukee, Washington, Dodge, Sheboygan, Fond du Lac, Manitowoc, Calumet, Kewaunee, Brown, & Door - 

we all got even more welcome news: 

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is expanding the list of areas that will need to meet federal smog regulations along Lake Michigan in Wisconsin. The revised air quality designations are a win for environmental groups, but the state’s largest business lobby argues the move will harm economic development.

The revisions are the result of legal challenges to the agency’s 2018 list of areas that weren’t meeting tougher standards for ozone pollution or smog that were put in place by the Obama administration in 2015.  

Clean Wisconsin was among environmental groups who sued the EPA over a pared-down list of areas that weren’t meeting those standards. As part of a federal court ruling last July, the EPA reviewed designations impacting 16 counties in seven states that included Indiana, Illinois and Wisconsin.

In Wisconsin, the list of areas that weren’t meeting federal smog regulations included lakeshore areas of Kenosha, Door, Manitowoc, Sheboygan, northern Milwaukee and Ozaukee counties.

To refresh your memories, the Federal air quality standards were weakened when former EPA administrator and climate change enabler Scott Pruitt 

took time away from his other priorities, like obtaining a used mattress from a certain DC hotel, to hand Scott Walker the win for dirtier air he needed so Foxconn could legally belch out the air pollution tonnage that Walker's DNR had quickly legalized: 

Hey, good news, Racine County asthmatics, seniors, and kids:

The DNR waited a whole eight days after the comment period closed to approve all four, very detailed air emission permits for Foxconn:

Foxconn is applying for at least four permits to emit large tonnages of air pollutants annually. 

Those emission have been compared to the operation of a large paper mill, and the state is busy trying to weaken air quality standards and monitoring in the area.

Side note: After Pruitt's fixation on a mattress connected to The Former guy, and then the goofier and longer-lasting allegiance show by the MyPillow guy, I am compelled to ask:

Why does The Strongman of Mar-a-Lago attract such strange bedfellows? 

Anyway - the DNR's award of those permits and its separate, fast-tracked grant of a Lake Michigan water diversion for production of big glass panels Foxconn now says it no longer will manufacture at its Mt. Pleasant facility should also be reviewed and withdrawn by the agency. 

The sacrifice of environmental principles to get billions of dollars in public subsidies approved for Foxconn stunk from the beginning, like the political and financial shenanigans that gave the entire debacle life; the DNR's permitting 'process' for Foxconn set precedents which need to be fully exposed, then overturned, so they cannot be cited or duplicated later.

A Foxconn archive begun four years ago and updated continuously is here.

The scandalous, abusive trade of public health and clean air for profit-driven air pollution when we know how big the impacts will be makes for a case study of the dangerous breadth of special-interest governance.

It also shows - as do the refusal of Walker's hand-picked Natural Resources Board chairman to step down after his term has ended and the lingering power of the GOP's gerrymandered legislators swept into office on Walker's tea party coattails - that much of Walker's literally toxic legacy remains in place even though he was defeated in 2018:

...in a mirror of the 2018 lame duck session in which legislative Republicans took power away from the incoming Democratic governor and attorney general, the state’s Republicans are finding ways to thwart the will of Wisconsin voters more than three years after Walker was voted out. (Wisconsin governors serve a four year term.)

“You’ve got what is essentially a coup to maintain the last governor’s control of the board, they’re basically stealing power,” Jeff Mandell, co-founder of progressive legal outfit Law Forward, says. “They’ve found sort of a back door way to perpetuate the legacy, power and policies of Gov. Walker — who the voters chose to get rid of.” 

On Critical Race Theory, WI has deep pool of white GOP experts

What luck!

A gaggle of white Wisconsin Republican legislators interested in blowing up Critical Race Theory Instruction -

Wisconsin GOP Introduces Bills Barring Critical Race Theory

- can supplement their first-hand ignorance with team teaching assistance by proven experts Ron Johnson, Tom Tiffany and Glenn Grothman. 

Robin Vos can sub in for any of them.

Paul Ryan can bring his unique, 'smartest guy in the room' wisdom to the conversation.

And State Supreme Court Justice Patience Roggensack can add to the debate - should the notably-do-nothing/always-adjourning GOP-led Legislature actually conduct a debate - her special anthropological expertise on minority living in Wisconsin which she'd already shared from the bench when she was Chief Justice.

On, Wisconsin!

WI GOP again proves it's the pain and suffering party

After flaying the Evers administration over payment delays related to 1970's Unemployment Compensation (UC) system equipment, the pain and suffering do-all-harm GOP legislative majority

just blocked funding for a UC system upgrade. 

Republican lawmakers are declining to spend $15 million to upgrade computer system for unemployment insurance

As I recently wrote, Wisconsin's GOP leaders are running a pain and suffering operation out of the State Capitol that deliberately keeps low-income and disadvantaged citizens trapped in poverty, bad health and powerlessness.

These GOP legislators collected full pay and benefits while taking most of 2020 off, yet have recently voted against food aid, school funding and broadened health care coverage for the poor.

And given their self-serving and taxpayer-financed-and-gerrymandered privilege and power, the Legislature will be run by Republicans with this rancid partisan arrogance for the foreseeable future.

As I'd said, "it's a disgrace."

The text of my previous post about this is below:

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

You really need a scorecard - and a strong stomach - to track the deliberate actions that WI GOP legislators have recently taken which knowingly inflict pain and suffering on state citizens, especially those with the least resources to fight back.

* Wisconsin's GOP legislative leaders sent all members home for most of 2020 with full salary and benefits without legislatively-confronting the COVID19 crisis, fought the Governor's emergency health orders, forced voters to cast ballots at polling stations while the airborne virus was surging, and were willing to trade a ten-fold increase in positive COVID cases for ending masking orders. 

All that and more is documented here.

* Then they sloppily cancelled $70 million a month in federally-provide emergency food aid for low-income residents and those who had lost jobs to the crisis. 

The life-or-death funding was restored by the Governor and Federal Government, not the GOP legislators who created the problem and the anxieties that went with it.

* Earlier this week the same GOP leaders refused again without debate to accept federally-funded health care insurance coverage for 91,000 state citizens, including some working in a state where Republicans have kept the minimum wage frozen at $7.25/hr. - but earn just enough above the federally-defined poverty level and do not quality for the state's Medicaid program.

The funding would have saved state taxpayers $1.6 billion dollars the GOP leaders are willing to plug in to cover some of what the sacrificed federal money would have financed, but that's how our state's fake conservatives roll.

GOP Assembly Leader Robin Vos continues to block federally-funded expanded health care coverage for 91,000 low-income residents.

A Wisconsin physician explained what turning aside the federal funding would mean to her low-income patients:

Dr. Ann Helms, a neurologist in Brookfield, treats patients with strokes.

“So I see patients when they have no choice but to go to the hospital. The number of patients I have saying, ‘You have to discharge me, I can’t afford this. I’m going to go bankrupt,” said Dr. Helms. “They end up with catastrophic medical bills and are never able to work again. So they end up on permanent disability. Whereas, if we had been able to cover $5 of antihypertensive and a visit to the doctor twice a year, they’d be able to still be working.”

* And on Thursday the state GOP Death Cult's leadership cut so much money from the Governor's proposed school aid budget, and played so many rule-breaking games with it, that another $1.5 billion in federally-provided COVID funding for schools is now imperiled.

Republican leaders know these decisions put people's health, jobs, futures and lives at risk - even as COVID19 still infects and kills state citizens - yet our taxpayer-paid public 'servants' do not care.

They only care about remaining in gerrymandered-protected, benefit-laden and do-little-to-nothing legislative seats- 

The Wisconsin Legislature has been the least active full-time state legislative body in the country since states began taking measures to combat the COVID-19 pandemic, a WisPolitics.com review finds. 

 - from which they are working on a single agenda: diminishing Gov. Evers and defeating him in a 2022 election they are busy rigging in their favor with a raft of new voting suppression laws.

It's a disgrace.

Judge: DNR erred issuing golf course wetland-fill permit

Opponents of the Kohler golf course project won a major round Friday when Sheboygan Circuit Court Judge L. Edward Stengel affirmed that the WI DNR had awarded the project its key wetland-fill permit based on incomplete and inaccurate information, as the opponents had argued.

The ruling can be appealed, and I will write about this later, but this is one giant step towards re-establishing law, logic and science in the public interest  - a 21-part series about this history is here, with Chapter 10 devoted to the golf course fight - after all the intentional Walker-era damage intentionally done to the DNR and so much Wisconsin land, water and clean air the DNR was supposed to be leading.

Part of the actual acreage within Kohler Andrae State Park which would be transferred by the DNR to the privately-owned golf course for road, parking and property storage.

Below is the heart of the ruling: "ALJ" refers to an Administrative Law Judge who had found the permit invalid - a ruling which Kohler Co. had challenged: 

In his decision, the ALJ extensively discussed his findings that the full risk assessments and final operational documents submitted by Kohler were not completed at the time that the permit was issued. 

The ALJ concluded that the Department issued the wetlands fill permit on the basis of incomplete, and possibly incorrect, information, making it impossible for the DNR to make the appropriate and necessary findings to comply with Wisconsin statutes and administrative regulations. Without having the necessary information required by law before it, the ALJ concluded that the DNR had no basis upon which to issue the permit and that the Department improperly relied on promises from Kohler that it would adhere environmental regulations and restrictions that were not part of the mandated conditions listed in the final permit.

The responsibility of the ALJ at the contested case hearing was to determine if the permit was issued on sound evidence. However, after a hearing that lasted five days and reviewing the record assembled before the DNR, the ALJ concluded that the Department issued the permit on incomplete and inaccurate information. The contested case hearing was not a second permitting hearing. 

 The contested case hearing was conducted to review a decision issued by the DNR. Kohler attempts to tum the contested case hearing into a second fact finding hearing to cure defects that arose during the original permitting process. The time to submit complete and accurate information was during the initial permitting hearing. The contested case hearing is not the proverbial "second kick at the cat", a chance to cure all the defects of the initial permitting process. Accepting Kohler's argument would ignore the language of statutes regarding the purpose and the rules governing both the initial permit proceeding and a contested case hearing review.

Wisconsin courts have already ruled that statutory language should be read to give

reasonable effect to every word published in the statute. Martin, supra at 893-894. Kohler's argument would have the court ignore this long standing doctrine in favor of a novel theory without basis in statute or case law.

If Kohler's argument were to be adopted, any entity requesting a wetlands fill permit would be allowed to provide incomplete and inaccurate evidence to support its request at the initial hearing stage, yet avoid any consequences from its failure to prove its case by requesting a contested case hearing. Under Kohler's new rules, a developer could request a contested case hearing, present information that should have be submitted in the initial hearing, along with any new evidence that it could uncover or develop in the time between its original hearing and the contest case proceeding, and submit it in support of its case. The permitting hearing before the DNR would, in effect, become a practice run for the real proceeding before the ALJ. Instead of being reviewed by numerous personnel and with the full weight of the resources available to the DNR, one judicial officer would issue the final permit. This would make the standards and procedures set out in law and regulation for obtaining a wetland fill permit superfluous and drain them of any meaning. 

If Kohler's argument were to be adopted, the initial hearing requesting a permit would become a trial run for the real permitting hearing which would take place during the contested case proceeding. This would be in direct contradiction to the intent of the legislature and be a waste of both agency and judicial resources. Taken to its final conclusion, Kohler's argument results the nullification of existing statutes without legislative consent and the creation of new law by the judicial fiat in direct violation of the separation of powers under the state constitution.

Based on the foregoing review and analysis, the request of Kohler to overturn the decision of the ALJ is DENIED and this matter DISMISSED in its entirety.

'Development' aims more harm at WI land, waters & indigenous cultures

It is unacceptable in the year 2021 for public agencies to continually trample on public lands, clean water and Native American cultures.

But that is precisely what is happening in two threatened high-profile land and water desecrations - one for a toxifying mining project enabled by corporate tools Scott Walker and Tom Tiffany along the Menominee River on the Wisconsin-Michigan border - 

- and the other, separately, on a Lake Michigan shoreline nature preserve and state park in Sheboygan County which has already gathered a host of public agency endorsements.

More below:

*Activist and educator Al Gedicks has recently explained - again - the threat to Native American lands, culture and waters posed by the Back 40 mine and its proposed waste tailings dam:

[The] design for storing mine waste, known as the upstream dam construction method, is being proposed for the Back Forty Project, a large metallic sulfide mine and tailings dam on the Wisconsin-Michigan border. This earthen tailings dam and mine would be just 150 feet from the Menominee River. Despite the fact that the Menominee River is an interstate waterway, the state of Michigan has assumed permitting authority because the proposed mine is located in Stephenson, Michigan. The Wisconsin DNR, under former Gov. Scott Walker, allowed Michigan to assume exclusive jurisdiction over the permitting process.

If this dam were breached it could send toxic wastes into Lake Michigan and threaten drinking water for millions in the upper Midwest. 

The Coalition to SAVE the Menominee River and the Menominee Indian Tribe of Wisconsin are determined to prevent this from happening. 

To send a letter urging Michigan’s Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy (EGLE) to deny the dam safety permit for the Back Forty Project, go to the coalition’s webpage: www.jointherivercoalition.org. To view a 5 minute video where I call for greater dam safety and inspections, go to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M089bmle35o

Recent court actions in Michigan could block the project, for now. 

* The investigative website WisconsinWatch last week produced a blockbuster piece - now receiving national circulation - that examined damage already preliminary done to Native American remains on a 247-wooded-and-wildlife-habitat-and-rare-dune-rich tract which will be heavily clearcut and otherwise altered if a privately-owned golf course project there receives final approvals: 

Archeologists have unearthed human remains of Native Americans who lived up to 2,500 years ago during excavations of the Sheboygan County site along Lake Michigan where Kohler Co. wants to build an 18-hole golf course. 

A University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee team in 2018 and 2019 inadvertently encountered  fragments of human bone and teeth from at least seven locations beneath the privately-owned wetlands and forest where Kohler Co. envisions its third championship facility in Wisconsin, according to documents obtained by Wisconsin Watch. 

The disturbance came while recovering tens of thousands of ceramics, tools and other artifacts at the 247-acre site during a study required under federal historic preservation law, according to a 2019 report. 

These two proposed 'developments' which would require the bulldozing of land, water and Native American culture is not incidental or accidental; Google "Spearfishing Controversy," or this explanation among many about the failed plan to demolish the pristine Penokee Hills in NW Wisconsin that would have had been ruinous impacts on the environment and specifically on the Bad River Ojibwe land, waters and way of life.

All of these episodes can be summed up in a remark at a pro-forma public hearing on the failed Penokee Hills mine bill made by then-State Rep. Jeff Stone, (R-Greenfield), as he justified the exclusion of Bad River representatives from the bill's insider-managed authorship.

Though video of Stone's remark is no longer available as it was when I posted about it in 2012, two telling public records provide the details and context.

1. The quote is in print:

Assembly committee OKs GOP bill to streamline iron mining permit process 

"I don't think our job is to provide a seat at the table for the tribes, who want to be treated as a sovereign nation," Stone said. 

2. And there is a three-minute video linked in this blog post which shows Stone and other GOP reps hustling to then-GOP Assembly Speaker Jeff Fitzgerald's office after they'd pushed the mining bill through a committee. 

The video ends with Capitol police telling the group with the videographer they could not come into Fitzgerald's office and had to leave the hallway outside where they were peaceably waiting because they had "no official business" with the legislators. 

Which, if you think about it, was a variation on Stone's dismissive, no-seat-at-the-table message.

And which continues to be delivered by the intertwined corporate interests and public agencies to the opponents the proposed lakeshore golf course which would also eat up state parkland, too:

The Wisconsin Court of Appeals Tuesday reinstated a lawsuit challenging a deal that would trade part of Kohler-Andrae State Park for other lands so Kohler Company can build another golf course along Lake Michigan....

Sheboygan County judge Edward Stengel dismissed the action for lack of standing.... 

In Tuesday’s ruling, the court found that the [Friends of the Black River Forest] plaintiffs had in fact alleged sufficient injuries to be heard, not just dismissed. 

It is “not hypothetical or conjectural that the land exchange may cause the Friends to suffer the alleged recreational, aesthetic, and conservational injuries as a result of the golf course construction,” the court wrote. 

The injuries included the plaintiffs’ loss of use of the portion of the park given to Kohler, loss of wildlife likely to result from development of the course, and the impact the course would have on the remaining part, including more traffic and noise. 

The plaintiffs also contend the DNR didn’t follow proper procedures in conveying the park property to Kohler.

The WI GOP is the pain & suffering party

You really need a scorecard - and a strong stomach - to track the deliberate actions that WI GOP legislators have recently taken which knowingly inflict pain and suffering on state citizens, especially those with the least resources to fight back.

* Wisconsin's GOP legislative leaders sent all members home for most of 2020 with full salary and benefits without legislatively-confronting the COVID19 crisis, fought the Governor's emergency health orders, forced voters to cast ballots at polling stations while the airborne virus was surging, and were willing to trade a ten-fold increase in positive COVID cases for ending masking orders. 

All that and more is documented here.

* Then they sloppily cancelled $70 million a month in federally-provide emergency food aid for low-income residents and those who had lost jobs to the crisis. 

The life-or-death funding was restored by the Governor and Federal Government, not the GOP legislators who created the problem and the anxieties that went with it.

* Earlier this week the same GOP leaders refused again without debate to accept federally-funded health care insurance coverage for 91,000 state citizens, including some working in a state where Republicans have kept the minimum wage frozen at $7.25/hr. - but earn just enough above the federally-defined poverty level and do not quality for the state's Medicaid program.

The funding would have saved state taxpayers $1.6 billion dollars the GOP leaders are willing to plug in to cover some of what the sacrificed federal money would have financed, but that's how our state's fake conservatives roll.

GOP Assembly Leader Robin Vos continues to block federally-funded expanded health care coverage for 91,000 low-income residents.

A Wisconsin physician explained what turning aside the federal funding would mean to her low-income patients:

Dr. Ann Helms, a neurologist in Brookfield, treats patients with strokes.

“So I see patients when they have no choice but to go to the hospital. The number of patients I have saying, ‘You have to discharge me, I can’t afford this. I’m going to go bankrupt,” said Dr. Helms. “They end up with catastrophic medical bills and are never able to work again. So they end up on permanent disability. Whereas, if we had been able to cover $5 of antihypertensive and a visit to the doctor twice a year, they’d be able to still be working.”

* And on Thursday the state GOP Death Cult's leadership cut so much money from the Governor's proposed school aid budget, and played so many rule-breaking games with it, that another $1.5 billion in federally-provided COVID funding for schools is now imperiled.

Republican leaders know these decisions put people's health, jobs, futures and lives at risk - even as COVID19 still infects and kills state citizens - yet our taxpayer-paid public 'servants' do not care.

They only care about remaining in gerrymandered-protected, benefit-laden and do-little-to-nothing legislative seats- 

The Wisconsin Legislature has been the least active full-time state legislative body in the country since states began taking measures to combat the COVID-19 pandemic, a WisPolitics.com review finds. 

 - from which they are working on a single agenda: diminishing Gov. Evers and defeating him in a 2022 election they are busy rigging in their favor with a raft of new voting suppression laws.

It's a disgrace.

RoJo seeks 'honest and complete information.' Sometimes.

From Ron Johnson's Twitter feed on 5/27/21:

The world needs to know the origin of the Coronavirus. It is critical that this administration does its part by being transparent and providing the American people with honest and complete information. All I’m asking for is the truth.

 

Q. Say, Senator: How about the origin of the Jan. 6 insurrection? How about "providing the American people honest and complete information" about it, since people were killed that day...in your workplace? 

All I'm asking for is the truth.

A. Forget it:

Johnson opposes Jan. 6 commission.

"I hope no Republicans in the House vote for this," Johnson said. "I hope nobody in the Senate embraces it either."

 

Vos adds more duties to his Constitutional Office portfolio

Remember when GOP Assembly Speaker and defacto Health Services czar

Robin Vos puffed himself up to Constitutional Office status?

Except that - 

"There is no constitutional provision that creates a position called ‘Speaker of the Assembly,’" said Madison attorney Lester Pines, who typically represents Democrats and related causes. "It exists by custom and tradition. The Legislature could at any time choose to eliminate the position of ‘speaker.’ 

Anyway, Vos continues to multitask as self-appointed Health Services czar, shadow Governor AND State Treasurer, too:

Vos says no to plan that would provide Wisconsin with $1.6 billion for health care

And now - throw in Attorney General, too, because Inspector Vos Von Clouseau 

is on the case: 

Assembly Speaker Robin Vos is hiring retired police officers to investigate aspects of the November election, joining with Republicans from around the country who have questioned President Joe Biden’s victory.

DNR undermines newly-posted WI wolf hunt planning

The Wisconsin DNR has posted new information about plans and procedures for the fall 2021 wolf hunt. Details are here.

While I credit the agency for the detailed posting, I'll wait and see how much public input is adopted and whether authentic participation by opponents is allowed, and, given the quota-breaking February slaughter of more than 200 Wisconsin wolves - 

Hunters Killed 82% More Wolves Than Quota Allowed in Wisconsin 

The state’s Department of Natural Resources granted permits to about 1,500 hunters to kill 119 wolves, but 216 were shot

 - as well as earlier killing seasons in which the WI DNR allowed its published quotas to be exceeded - 

- let me register in the strongest terms an objection to this self-serving, credibility-crushing-second sentence on the agency's re-crafted wolf information webpage: 

The Wisconsin DNR has successfully managed gray wolves for decades and will continue to do so in accordance with the laws of our state and the best science available.

To be fair, the DNR was - and still is - dealing with a bad procedural hand dealt to it by fact-challenged state legislators who were and remain in thrall to some hunting and other so-called 'sportsmen's' lobbies.

But the agency does itself no favors claiming adherence to best, science-based practices when the record shows otherwise.