First the Colorado High Court… now Wisconsin’s. We are witnessing the weaponization of the Judicial system by Marxists. Any means necessary. Dark days are ahead.
MADISON – The Wisconsin Supreme Court on Friday ordered the Republican-controlled state Legislature to draw new legislative boundaries ahead of the 2024 election, arguing their GOP advantage is unconstitutional — delivering a long-sought win for Democrats who have stayed deep in the Legislature’s minority for more than a decade.
The court in a 4-3 decision said the court is also prepared to replace the state’s heavily gerrymandered maps if the Legislature and Democratic governor cannot agree on a new plan.
Here is my full column that ran in the Washington County Daily News earlier this week:
“Wisconsin’s open government laws promote democracy by ensuring that all state, regional and local governments conduct their business with transparency. Wisconsin citizens have a right to know how their government is spending their tax dollars and exercising the powers granted by the people.”
— Attorney General Josh Kaul, Wisconsin Public Records Law Compliance Guide
Based on the principle that transparency in government is both a right of the people and an obligation of government officials, Wisconsin has some of the best open records laws in the nation. That is why it is so troubling to learn that our Governor, Tony Evers, has been hiding his official email communications behind an secret alias for years. What else is he hiding?
The news came to light a few weeks ago when Wisconsin Right Now, a conservative news and opinion outlet, learned that Governor Evers has been using the name of Hall of Fame Milwaukee Braves pitcher Warren Spahn’s name for the governor’s secret email address warrenspahn@ wisconsin.gov. According to a disclosure from the governor’s office, there are over 17,000 emails to and from the governor’s secret email address between 2017 and 2023.
Evers dismissed the disclosure as not newsworthy while pretending that using secret email addresses was normal government practice. As someone who has requested records for decades, the governor’s assertion is news to me, other open government advocates, and news agencies. Secret emails are not normal except for politicians who are trying to hide something.
Wisconsin’s Open Records Laws are clear and unambiguous. When someone requests records from a public official about a particular subject or time period, the official is compelled by law to provide all of those records irrespective of whether the records are from their official email account, personal email account, text, chat, or any other format. It is the content of the records that makes them government records and subject to disclosure – not the means of transmission. The fact that the governor has failed to disclose the content of his secret email account despite dozens of legal open records requests is a clear violation of the law.
This governor has a history of secrecy. In 2019, FOX6 had to sue the governor to get emails. FOX6 had filed a routing request for a couple of weeks of emails. They had a practice of this to just see what might turn up. The governor rejected the request claiming that the news agency needed to narrow the request to a specific search term. The governor’s novel interpretation of the law was ludicrous and against the law as written and practiced for decades. After FOX6 sued, the governor finally relented and released some emails. At that time, however, the governor did not disclose the governor’s secret emails as required by law.
Furthermore, during that imbroglio, Tony Evers scoffed at the request saying, “Oh, that’ll be pretty, pretty boring I’ll tell ya. If I do one email a day, that’s an extraordinary day… It’s pretty boring. I mean, I can’t remember sending an email all week.’ That is a lie. Evers knew at the time that he was using a secret email account that was averaging over nine emails per day for years.
Governor Tony Evers’ culture of secrecy is antithetical to good government. When politicians are acting above board in good faith, they do not mind the public looking at their work and communications. When politicians are doing wrong, they scurry in the shadows like rats. Evers is reflexively secretive and acts with the arrogance on one who has spent his life in government. In the case of his secret email account, he has clearly been violating the law by failing to disclose it in response to records requests.
Harvard University, in the face of mounting questions over possible plagiarism in the scholarly work of its president, Claudine Gay, said Wednesday that it had found two additional instances of insufficient citation in her work.
The issues were found in Gay’s 1997 doctoral dissertation, in which Harvard said it had found two examples of “duplicative language without appropriate attribution.”
Last week, Harvard said an earlier review had found two published articles that needed additional citations, and that Gay would request corrections.
Xi told Biden in a group meeting attended by a dozen American and Chinese officials that China’s preference is to take Taiwan peacefully, not by force, the officials said.
The Chinese leader also referenced public predictions by U.S. military leaders who say that Xi plans to take Taiwan in 2025 or 2027, telling Biden that they were wrong because he has not set a time frame, according to the two current and one former official briefed on the meeting.
Chinese officials also asked in advance of the summit that Biden make a public statement after the meeting saying that the United States supports China’s goal of peaceful unification with Taiwan and does not support Taiwanese independence, they said. The White House rejected the Chinese request.
A spokesperson for the National Security Council declined to comment.
The revelations provide previously unreported details about a critical meeting between the two leaders that was intended to reduce tensions between their countries.
Xi’s private warning to Biden, while not markedly different from his past public comments on reunifying Taiwan, got the attention of U.S. officials because it was delivered at a time when China’s behavior toward Taiwan is seen as increasingly aggressive and ahead of a potentially pivotal presidential election in the self-governing democratic island next month.
It’s difficult to see how this survives SCOTUS for a lot of reasons (how does a court in Colorado decide that someone committed a crime in another jurisdiction where the defendant is never afforded due process), but it does show just how anti-democratic the liberals have become and the lengths to which they are willing to go to get their way.
DENVER (AP) — A divided Colorado Supreme Court on Tuesday declared former President Donald Trump ineligible for the White House under the U.S. Constitution’s insurrection clause and removed him from the state’s presidential primary ballot, setting up a likely showdown in the nation’s highest court to decide whether the front-runner for the GOP nomination can remain in the race.
The decision from a court whose justices were all appointed by Democratic governors marks the first time in history that Section 3 of the 14th Amendment has been used to disqualify a presidential candidate.
“A majority of the court holds that Trump is disqualified from holding the office of president under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment,” the court wrote in its 4-3 decision.
Colorado’s highest court overturned a ruling from a district court judge who found that Trump incited an insurrection for his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, but said he could not be barred from the ballot because it was unclear that the provision was intended to cover the presidency.
Judge Loretta Preska wrote ‘unsealed in full’ next to the names of 177 Does who are Epstein’s friends, recruiters, victims and others whose names will be revealed when the material is released within the coming weeks.
The material is related to a defamation case brought by Prince Andrew’s accuser Virginia Roberts in New York against Epstein’s madam Ghislaine Maxwell.
The hundreds of files will shed new light on the late financier’s sex trafficking operation and his network of influence
Roberts sued Maxwell for defamation in 2016 and while the case was settled, The Miami Herald – which published a bombshell expose of Epstein that led to his arrest in 2019 – sued to get the documents made public.
[…]
In her ruling Judge Preska gave 14 days for any Does who objected to their documents being made public to object, after which they would be unsealed.
Based on the principle that transparency in government is both a right of the people and an obligation of government officials, Wisconsin has some of the best open records laws in the nation. That is why it is so troubling to learn that our Governor, Tony Evers, has been hiding his official email communications behind an secret alias for years. What else is he hiding?
The news came to light a few weeks ago when Wisconsin Right Now, a conservative news and opinion outlet, learned that Governor Evers has been using the name of Hall of Fame Milwaukee Braves pitcher Warren Spahn’s name for the governor’s secret email address warrenspahn@ wisconsin.gov. According to a disclosure from the governor’s office, there are over 17,000 emails to and from the governor’s secret email address between 2017 and 2023.
Evers dismissed the disclosure as not newsworthy while pretending that using secret email addresses was normal government practice. As someone who has requested records for decades, the governor’s assertion is news to me, other open government advocates, and news agencies. Secret emails are not normal except for politicians who are trying to hide something.
Wisconsin’s Open Records Laws are clear and unambiguous. When someone requests records from a public official about a particular subject or time period, the official is compelled by law to provide all of those records irrespective of whether the records are from their official email account, personal email account, text, chat, or any other format. It is the content of the records that makes them government records and subject to disclosure – not the means of transmission. The fact that the governor has failed to disclose the content of his secret email account despite dozens of legal open records requests is a clear violation of the law.
[…]
Furthermore, during that imbroglio, Tony Evers scoffed at the request saying, “Oh, that’ll be pretty, pretty boring I’ll tell ya. If I do one email a day, that’s an extraordinary day… It’s pretty boring. I mean, I can’t remember sending an email all week.’ That is a lie. Evers knew at the time that he was using a secret email account that was averaging over nine emails per day for years.
Governor Tony Evers’ culture of secrecy is antithetical to good government. When politicians are acting above board in good faith, they do not mind the public looking at their work and communications. When politicians are doing wrong, they scurry in the shadows like rats. Evers is reflexively secretive and acts with the arrogance on one who has spent his life in government. In the case of his secret email account, he has clearly been violating the law by failing to disclose it in response to records requests.
Hamas leaders and Islamic scholars met in Pakistan’s capital for a convention last week and argued that Israel’s war in Gaza would end if Pakistan, a country armed with nuclear weapons, threatened Israel.
[…]
“Pakistan is a strong country. If Pakistan threatens Israel, then the war can stop,” Haniyeh said. “We have lots of expectations from Pakistan. Pakistan can force Israel to retreat.”
“In this war, our 20,000 children, women, and men have been martyred,” he said. “At this time we are destroying Israel’s most modern weapons. We have hope we will succeed.”
The conference was also attended by Hamas leader Naji Zuhair, who had been in Pakistan in recent weeks. Conference attendees recognized Hamas fighters as a “political force” waging a “defensive jihad.”
LONDON — A U.S. warship shot down 14 suspected attack drones over the Red Sea on Saturday, and a Royal Navy destroyer downed another drone that was targeting commercial ships, the British and American militaries said.
Houthi rebels in Yemen have launched a series of attacks on vessels in the Red Sea, one of the world’s busiest shipping routes, and have launched drones and missiles targeting Israel, as the Israel-Hamas war threatens to spread.
U.S. Central Command said that the destroyer USS Carney “successfully engaged 14 unmanned aerial systems” launched from Houthi-controlled areas of Yemen.
The drones “were shot down with no damage to ships in the area or reported injuries,” Central Command tweeted.
U.K. Defense Secretary Grant Shapps said that HMS Diamond fired a Sea Viper missile and destroyed a drone that was “targeting merchant shipping.” The overnight action is the first time the Royal Navy has shot down an aerial target in anger since the 1991 Gulf War.
Innovation is hard and expensive. This is the trial and error of capitalism. When government decides to weigh in and force something that is economically unviable, it retards the system’s ability to innovate.
But there’s growing concern across the industry, not just with GM and Cruise, about the viability of autonomous vehicles, or AVs, as a business instead of as a niche science project.
“AV technology, while they’ve made a lot of progress with it, is unlikely to be profitable anytime in the foreseeable future, certainly not this decade,” said Sam Abuelsamid, principal research analyst at Guidehouse Insights. “If they need to make cuts, robotaxis seem like the obvious place to do that.”
Some Wall Street analysts are holding out hope that GM and Barra can turn Cruise around and eventually refocus on growing the business, as the Detroit automaker takes a more hands-on approach with the company. Several are expecting updates at an investor event in March.
“The plan to pause Cruise operations and reduce spending on Cruise in 2024 are only first steps. Once again, we expect these concerns to be addressed and cured at the capital markets day in early 2024 but expect skepticism to remain in the interim,” Morgan Stanley analyst John Murphy said in a Nov. 29 investor note.
If GM can’t turn the operations around, Cruise would join a list of its past defunct growth businesses, partnerships and investments since 2016.
As businesses push forward on hitting diversity goals, a major insurance company in the U.K. is telling its 22,000 strong workforce that senior white male new hires must be personally approved by none other than the CEO.
Aviva’s boss Amanda Blanc said the policy forms part of the company’s efforts to stamp out sexism in the financial services industry.
[…]
“The scope of the charter is to get more women into senior management roles,” Blanc explained the reasoning for the measure. “My belief is if you have more women in senior management roles, this behavior will go away.”
Because women are incapable of sexism or racism, I guess.
MADISON, Wis. (AP) — The Wisconsin Supreme Court on Wednesday declined to hear a lawsuit brought by Democrats seeking to end the state’s taxpayer-funded private school voucher program.
The lawsuit could be refiled in county circuit court, as both Democratic Gov. Tony Evers’ administration and Republican Assembly Speaker Robin Vos had argued. The Supreme Court rejected it without comment in an unsigned, unanimous order.
Democrats who brought the lawsuit asked the state Supreme Court to take the case directly, which would have resulted in a much faster final ruling than having the case start in lower courts.
Many Americans were shocked by the militant antisemitism that erupted from our nation’s universities in the wake of Hamas’ evil murder, rape, kidnapping, and torture of Israeli civilians on October 7th. Some of us have watched the growing racial and religious hate growing in our universities for years, but the virulent display of hate by students and faculty has laid bare a malignant cancer in our culture.
The darker realization is that the bigotry we see on campuses all over our nation is being taught. It is the result of the incremental, but intentional, decline of our universities into schools that prioritize teaching people to be leftist activists instead of enlightened thought leaders. We see that prioritization on full display in Wisconsin.
The legislative Republicans, led by Speaker Robin Vos and undermined by Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu, have been withholding money for employee raises for the Universities of Wisconsin until UW agreed to eliminate its Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) staff. Although DEI is infused throughout the Universities, the UW currently has 43 exclusive DEI positions and about 34,000 total employees.
Despite the stated high-minded rhetorical ideals around DEI, it is part of the cancer in our universities. DEI purports to promote individualism and unique individual experiences. In practice, it devolves into categorizing people into arbitrary racial, ethnic, religious, gender, and economic groups, assigning a relative value to each category, and then encouraging separatism and discrimination. It fosters a culture of dehumanizing the “other” by assigning people to groups instead of engaging them as individuals. DEI programs favor racial segregation in dorms and learning spaces, quotas for admissions and hiring, and silences voices from unfavored people. As practiced on our UW campuses, DEI has long since left behind principles of tolerance and equality.
Furthermore, while some DEI professionals still try to adhere to classical liberal principles of inclusion, many of these DEI positions have become destination jobs for some of the most hateful, bigoted, and vile people in our society. Too many times when we watch another racist screed online, we see it coming from someone who has a career in the protected DEI club of academia.
Seeing this cancer growing in our state universities, Speaker Vos and his compatriots sought to use a financial wedge to force positive change at UW by withholding money for employee raises until the UW eliminated its 43 dedicated DEI positions. Last week, Vos caved and agreed to a compromise that I thought gave too much for too little.
In the sixteen-point deal, the UW would agree to freeze, not eliminate, its DEI positions in place. UW would also agree to adhere to rulings of the U.S. Supreme Court to not discriminate in admissions, pull back on racial discrimination for hiring, add a teaching module about freedom of expression, and implement an automatic admission program for Wisconsin’s top High School students.
In return for these modest concessions by UW that involve mostly doing things that they should be doing anyway, Vos agreed to open the financial floodgates and lavish hundreds of millions of dollars on UW to pay for employee raises, build a long-sought new engineering building, pay for several new building projects all over the system, and pay to demolish and remove 21 old buildings. That is a lot of construction for a UW with steeply declining enrollment.
Despite this surrender by Vos where UW got almost everything it wanted, the UW Regents voted to reject the compromise. What does this tell us about the UW Regents and the leadership of the Universities of Wisconsin?
In a $7.53 billion budget for the Universities of Wisconsin, the Regents always had budgetary room to pay for employee raises and buildings, but they prioritized DEI and administration. At UW-Madison alone, they have grown administration and support staff by 23 percent in the last ten years according to The College Fix. The instructional staff to undergrad ratio has stayed constant at about one to ten while there is now about one administrator for every four undergrads.
There was always budgetary room for employee raises – there still is – but the UW leadership decided to hold those raises hostage to put pressure on the legislature to agree to continue to fund DEI.
Is it any wonder that our universities have become cesspools of hate and division? The leadership and administration of those universities are making the choice to maintain and grow cancerous teachings at the expense of all else. We are regressing as a culture in terms of tolerance, acceptance, and inclusion and that regression is being led by our universities like the Universities of Wisconsin.
From Bice. Honestly… bonehead mistake and he handled it with humor and humility. Funny story
Burgelis, who is running for a seat on the Milwaukee Common Council, briefly appeared shirtless during a livestream for the Milwaukee County Board’s Judiciary, Law Enforcement and General Services Committee on Dec. 4. The meeting was being held at the Milwaukee County Courthouse, while Burgelis monitored it virtually from home.
More than two hours into the meeting, the livestream showed Burgelis, a rookie supervisor, without clothes from his waist up for less than 10 seconds. His feed was cut off a little more than a minute after he first appeared bare-chested on the video.
He said he did have pants on.
“It’s embarrassing,” said Burgelis, a mortgage loan officer. “This was clearly not intentional, though I’m always eager to get more exposure for the county, my campaign or my social life.”
As it turns out, Burgelis isn’t even a member of this County Board committee. He said he was using his cellphone to watch what was going on with the panel while doing his laundry at home. He said he had taken off his shirt and tossed it in the wash.
Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky is going to Washington DC to try to rescue a threatened US defence package to Kyiv worth billions of dollars.
The aid has become embroiled in US domestic, partisan politics.
It will be Mr Zelensky’s third visit to the US since Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
The week is a crucial one for Ukraine, with the European Union also deciding whether to open formal talks on its accession to the bloc.
Few thoughts…
This war shows no sign of ending any time soon, and no sign that Ukraine can win, without a massive infusion of people, material, and cash from someone like us. There is no political will in America to spend American blood on this war.
The only thing that will be different if they negotiate an end to the war now versus 1 year from now is that Russia will likely push into even more Ukrainian territory in a year. It appears that Ukraine has blown its offensive wad. They can fight a long, bloody defensive war almost indefinitely.
Through the entire war, Zelinsky has shifted to full tyrant. He’s canceled elections, imprisoned political opponents, silenced political speech, and is now assassinating ex-pat opponents in foreign countries. There seems to be very little daylight between the ruling style of Zelinsky and that of Putin. This is no longer a fight for the freedom of the Ukrainian people. Democracy has died with Zelinsky and will not be revived even if he wins.
Also, we cannot overlook the American Taxpayer -> Ukraine -> Hunter – > Joe money laundering that has clearly been going on for years. We cannot trust that the Biden Syndicate is acting purely out of the interests of America and not their own personal interests. Do Zelinsky have the goods on Biden and is blackmailing him? Is the taxpayers’ investment in the Ukrainian War just an investment in the Biden family’s generational retirement plan?
Finally, I do understand the stated American interest in this war beyond the role of America supporting Democracy anywhere. There is a reasonable fear that this is similar to Hitler’s seizure of the Sudetenland and such in the 1930s. If we allow Putin’s territorial seizures to go unanswered, he will spread into Europe. And if he does that, then it will trigger our NATO obligations to defend Europe with American blood.
That was a reasonable fear at the beginning of the war, but less so now. Even if he wins in keeping half of Ukraine, this war has bled Putin’s war machine and his domestic political strength with it. Putin will not be able to muster enough force and domestic political support to take on a NATO country for many years, and he is an old man. He doesn’t have many years. Hitler was in his 40s when he began stealing territory. Putin is in his 70s. Russia was expecting an easy seizure of territory like they did in Crimea. It didn’t work. America’s national interest has been met in blunting Russia’s ability to engage in expansionist territorial adventures for some time to come. It is time for peace.
What is going on in West Bend? Kids fight… I get it… but in the space of a week there have been three major incidents of violence in which the police have been called. The Washington County Insider has been covering it and Mark Belling has been trying to get the district administration to pretend, at least, that they are doing something about it.
December 6, 2023 – West Bend, WI – On 12/05/23 at 6:06 p.m. officers were called to Badger Middle School regarding a physical altercation that occurred between a parent and coach at the conclusion of the 8th grade boys’ basketball game.
December 6, 2023 – West Bend, Wi – West Bend Police and the West Bend School District are looking into an incident that reportedly occurred Monday afternoon, December 4, 2023, at Badger Middle School.
[…]
“The Badger police liaison officer was asked to respond to a disturbance in one of the school hallways during dismissal time. The officer determined that two 13-year-old female students were having an argument in the hallway. A 14-year-old male student inserted himself into the argument and struck one of the female students and pushed the other into a locker or a wall.
I’ve watched the video of this attack. It was a vicious punch to the face where a boy slugged a girl.
December 8, 2023 – West Bend, Wi – On Friday, December 8, 2023, at 2:30 p.m., the West Bend Police Department received a report of a fight in progress in the parking lot of the West Bend High Schools (1305 E Decorah Rd). A 14-year-year-old female student, two 15-year-old male students, a 16-year-old female student, and two 16-year-old male students were involved in a physical fight near the bus pickup area during dismissal.
The fight was broken up by school staff, school police officers, and other responding area law enforcement officers. Five subjects were immediately taken into custody on scene. A sixth subject was located shortly after the incident at his residence and taken into custody.
One of the 16-year-old males suffered facial and head injuries and was taken to a local hospital for treatment via ambulance. The 14-year-old female, one of the 15-year-old males, and the 16-year-old female complained of minor injuries and were also taken to a local hospital for treatment via ambulance. All subjects remained in police custody while receiving initial medical treatment.
During the ensuing investigation, one of the initially detained subjects was determined to have been actively trying to stop the fight and was released to his parents. The other five subjects remained in custody until processed through the criminal juvenile intake system.
Three of the five subjects were placed into secure detention on felony charges of Physical Abuse of a Child. The remaining two subjects were processed, released to their parents, and will be facing a felony charge of Physical Abuse of a Child. Additional charges may be forthcoming.
A group of unions have filed suit demanding that Wisconsin’s 2011 Act 10 be thrown out. They argue that the law is unconstitutional because it discriminates between public safety government employees and general government employees. Given that neither public safety government employees nor general government employees constitute a protected class in the state Constitution or in law, the case should be thrown out on its face, but it is probable that this is the beginning of the end of Act 10.
Since it has been well over a decade since Act 10 was passed, it is worth refreshing our collective memories about it. In 2010, Democrat Gov. Jim Doyle had declined to run for reelection after a series of scandals and gross mismanagement of the budget. The state was facing a massive $3.6 billion structural deficit. When Gov. Scott Walker and his fellow legislative Republicans were swept into office on a wave of discontent, they were immediately confronted with fixing the deficit. Act 10 began in a special session in early 2011 to fix the Democrats’ budget deficit. A structural budget deficit required a structural repair. At the time, roughly half of the $28.3 billion general fund budget (it was $44.4 billion in the most recent budget — up 57% — but that is for another column) was entitlements. Pension costs ate up 13%, shared revenue and K-12 spending was 15%, and all other state needs (universities, prisons, natural resources, etc.) were squeezed into the remaining 22%. Act 10 was designed to address the structural budget by restructuring the pension and local government parts of the state budget. The problem was that government unions had a stranglehold on that spending. In the days before Act 10, the powerful government unions organized to elect local school board members and other local elected officials. When it came to bargain for government employees, everything was on the table and the union officials were usually negotiating with people they helped elect. The taxpayers were not represented.
Act 10 did a number of things including restricting government union negotiations to just wages, required government unions to certify every year to ensure the employees wanted the unions’ representation, required government employees to contribute to their own health insurance and pensions, made elected official and political appointees equal to other employees for pensions, restructured some old debt, provided funding for corrections, and separated UW Madison from the UW System by giving it flagship status. It was an expansive and well-crafted law.
It worked. The budget was repaired and the tremendous budgeting that Republicans did throughout the 2010s led to the $7 billion budget surplus that politicians are arguing about today. It all started with Act 10.
Act 10 has also led to incredible savings for Wisconsin’s taxpayers. According to the MacIver Institute, which has been tracking the impact of Act 10 since it was passed, the cumulative savings stemming from Act 10 for Wisconsin’s taxpayers as of March of this year is $16.8 billion. Put another way, Wisconsin’s high cost of government would have been $16.8 billion more taxing had Act 10 never been passed.
Furthermore, the government employees who most opposed Act 10 have been voting with their feet. According to the Wisconsin Policy Institute, of the 983 public-sector unions in Wisconsin at the time of Act 10’s passage, only 318 successfully recertified and were still bargaining for employees as of 2021. Teachers unions are still the most active with 56.2% of them still active. At the other end of the spectrum, only 3.4% of county employee unions are still active. Government employees have been clear. The vast majority of them reject unionization just as most other Wisconsin workers. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, only 9.3% of Wisconsin’s workers — including government workers — were unionized in 2021.
That’s the rub. Follow the money. The unions suing over Act 10 have been decimated by the law because it allows workers to choose. The unions want to return to the bad old days when unions existed in perpetuity and government workers were forced to be members and pay dues. The unions were also able to shake down taxpayers for even more money like when the state teachers union founded a health insurance company and forced school districts to use it. All of that stopped with Act 10 and the river of taxpayer money that flowed into union coffers slowed to a babbling brook.
Despite the fact that Act 10 was litigated multiple times and ruled legal and constitutional every single time, the unions are suing again 12 years after Act 10 passed into law. Why? Because they and their Democrat vassals managed to elect a leftist activist majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court. The unions and the Democrats are looking to get a return on their investment and reinvigorate the government unions by turning the taxpayer spigot back on full.
Sadly for Wisconsin’s taxpayers, they will probably get their way.
Sen. John Fetterman, D-Penn., said that he hopes Democrats know that it “isn’t xenophobic” to be worried about the southern border and argued that the Democratic Party should engage in debates about it.
“I hope Democrats can understand that it isn’t xenophobic to be concerned about the border,” Fetterman told Politico. “It’s a reasonable conversation, and Democrats should engage.”
Fetterman cited the near 270,000 border encounters in September, according to the outlet, and said it was “astonishing.”
“You essentially have Pittsburgh showing up there at the border,” he added.
ST. PAUL, Minn. — Minnesota is projected to have a budget surplus of $2.4 billion this biennium, state officials said Wednesday. But there are warning signs in future years that could lead to a potential deficit.
The $2.4 billion surplus is $800 million more than end-of-session estimates, but smaller than the eye-popping $17 billion surplus the state legislature had to work with when they began session this past January, before it passed a $72 billion state budget by adjournment in May.
California is facing a major budget crisis due to a “severe revenue decline,” and a record $68 billion budget deficit, likely forcing Democrats running the state to cut spending as the mass exodus of people and businesses moving to Republican-run states continues.
According to California’s non-partisan Legislative Analyst’s Office (LAO) report released Thursday, the state’s budget deficit has grown exponentially in just a few months’ time, up more than $54 billion from just $14.3 billion in June.
Minnesota has burned through a healthy surplus with massive spending and California already has a massive deficit. Both states are run by Democrats and are merely at different points in a very predictable trajectory.
There’s a lesson for Wisconsin here. We have a surplus right now that Democrats, and some Republicans, are fighting over how to spend it. The lesson is that politicians will spend whatever you give them and then some. The only way to control the size of government is to limit the money they can spend. If Democrats manage to retake the Legislature, this generation of Democrats has shown absolutely no willingness to restrain their spending. It would be a balance sheet bloodbath.
I have so little confidence in our justice system that I assume that there is a game being played here where Hunter will get off with a slap on the wrist and they will use that to deflect any further investigations. The tell is in the dates. According to the indictment, all of Hunter’s criminal activity happened between 2016 and 2020. Coincidentally, those were the only years in Joe’s adult life when he wasn’t in office.
Federal prosecutors have filed tax charges against Hunter Biden, a second criminal case against the US president’s son.
The indictment alleges he “engaged in a four-year scheme to not pay at least $1.4m in self-assessed federal taxes he owed for tax years 2016 through 2019”.
The nine charges include failure to file and pay taxes, false tax return and evasion of assessment.
[…]
Federal prosecutors allege Hunter Biden “spent millions of dollars on an extravagant lifestyle rather than paying his tax bills”.
Prosecutors allege that Hunter Biden instead spent his money on “drugs, escorts and girlfriends, luxury hotels and rental properties, exotic cars, clothing, and other items of a personal nature, in short, everything but his taxes”.
The indictment says that the president’s son “individually received more than $7 million in total gross income” between 2016 and mid-October 2020, but “willfully failed to pay his 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019 taxes on time, despite having access to funds to pay some or all of these taxes”.
[…]
Between 2016-19, he paid over $188,000 on “adult entertainment” and over $683,000 on “payments – various women”, according to the charge sheet.
Hunter Biden “continued to earn handsomely and to spend wildly in 2018”, prosecutors allege.
As his income increased, so did his expenditures, says the indictment.
In 2018, the defendant spent more than $1.8m, including hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash withdrawals, about $383,000 in payments to women and $151,000 on clothing.
But where did the money come from? And for what was Hunter paid?
