Top Posts of 2023

Readership here at YSDA was up 15% from 2022 after being up 30% from 2021 to 2022. So, we’re sort of like a cannon ball. Gravity is catching up with us, but we might have a couple more years before we slow so much that we fall harmlessly to the ground.

In reverse order, here are the 10 most popular posts of the year.

10. MMSD Consultant is Biased. Unsurprisingly, the identity-obsessed Madison School Board hired an identity-obsessed consultant to help it search for a new superintendent. We’re for an obsession with competence and actual student performance.

9. Following the Money. Kind of surprising to me that this pedestrian post about the January campaign finance reports in the Supreme Court and Madison Mayor’s races finished in the top ten. Maybe it wasn’t that, but the postscript where I chided the Dane County Board for continuing its long malfeasance in dealing with its jail crisis by voting down an advisory referendum. They didn’t want to make a decision themselves, but they also didn’t want to ask their constituents to help make one for them.

8. A Word on Language. This was my personal favorite, so I was happy, but also surprised, that it got this much readership. In this one I explained my editorial philosophy: be honest, be clear, be entertaining. Maybe readers liked it because I was inadvertently pointing out my own shortcomings.

7. Moving on From Jenkins. This one was written in response to the news that Madison Schools Superintendent Carlton Jenkins was retiring, not that anybody had noticed he had been here to begin with. I urged the School Board to replace Jenkins with someone more engaged and more focussed on safety and good order in the schools as well as the best interests of the vast majority of students who just want to learn.

6. Evers Messes Up Another PSC Appointment. I have my ongoing causes which I write about with some frequency, like paying college athletes and reducing the obsession with identity. Another of my favorites is the Public Service Commission, which has long been a revolving door between regulators and the utilities they regulate. This year Gov. Tony Evers completed the trifecta by appointing his third member with a glaring conflict of interest.

5. Stubbs Disqualifies Herself. I like Dane County Executive Joe Parisi and I wish him well when he leaves office in May. But he stumbled this year when he tried to appoint State Representative Shelia Stubbs to lead the county’s social services department. While I like her as my state rep, Stubbs has virtually no administrative experience and social services is the county’s biggest and most complex agency. When the County Board — including supervisors of color — understandably raised those concerns, Stubbs and Parisi played the race card and in a really irresponsible way. Stubbs called on supporters to storm the Capitol, never mind that county government is housed in the City-County Building. Stubbs’ appointment was eventually turned back, but a lot of unnecessary hard feelings remain.

4. In Defense of Guys. What got me going this time was the keynote speaker at this year’s Wisconsin Women in Government dinner. Patti Solis Doyle, a Democratic operative, went on about how much better women were as public officials. She said they were more collaborative, better listeners, harder workers, etc. I mused about the kind of reaction you’d get if a guy made a speech about how men are more logical and decisive. Ever wonder why Democrats are losing male voters in droves?

3. We Must Ban Rainbows. In this one I mocked the Waukesha Schools Superintendent for cancelling a first-graders’ spring concert because their teacher had included a song that talked about being nice to people who are different, even suggesting, without even saying so outright, that this should include (gasp!) gay and transgender kids.

2. A Bad Start. Literally within moments of taking over, the new liberal majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court fired Randy Koschnick, the widely-respected administrator of the state’s court system. Koschnick’s crime was being a conservative who once, many years ago, ran against the late liberal icon Justice Shirley Abrahamson. It was a clumsy, classless move which resulted in the liberals stepping on their own story.

1. Finally Turning on “Anti-Racism.” For my money, Ibram X. Kendi is the Joe McCarthy of his time. The author of “How to be an Anti-Racist” has inspired more cancellations, witch hunts, career destructions and purges than anyone since Tail Gunner Joe. He has helped create a climate of terror where any sensible person who would disagree with him that, “the only way to make up for past discrimination is through present discrimination,” would be labeled a racist by Kendi and his followers. I’ve written this for years, but what was different this year was that national liberals started to speak up against Kendi. In this post I wrote about Pamela Paul, the former editor of the New York Times Book Review and now a columnist for that official paper of fashionable liberal thought in America, going after Kendi not just for mismanaging millions of dollars at his institute but for his ideas themselves. I noted that she was criticizing him not just for keeping bad books, but for writing them. It could be a turning point.

As I look over that list it’s not surprising to me that the more conservative stuff dominates the top ten. I write a lot of liberal opinion too. But I’m still thought of in some circles as a liberal, so when I take a liberal position I suppose that elicits shrugs. For me to take the more conservative side of an argument still has some man-bites-dog about it. Occasionally, a Republican or a conservative will even delight in quoting me as in, “even the liberal former mayor of liberal Madison agrees with us about…” Then they precede to cull the sentences that support their argument while ignoring anything I wrote that cuts the other way.

Another way to look at it is that I’m one of the last true liberals. While former liberals practice politically correct censorship, I’m for free speech even when (especially when) some find it offensive. While former liberals tout “lived experience,” I still favor reason. Where former liberals support discrimination in the name of “equity,” I’m still for a color blind society. When former liberals disparage our democratic institutions as tools of the oppressors, I ask what they want to replace them with.

Sometimes I think I cede the liberal mantel too easily, but then I remember polls showing only one-in-four Americans identifying as liberal, compared to one-in-three who say they are conservative, and I think it’s a word not worth fighting over.

In any event, I enjoy writing this and I’m grateful that you take the time to read it and that many of you also take the time to comment, either in the comments section or in emails to me. Thanks for reading. It’s been a good year (well, for readership at YSDA, anyway) and I’m looking forward to 2024.

And another matter,, I was sorry to see the passing of Sen. Herb Kohl yesterday. I knew him a little bit when I was mayor and he was always just a heck of a nice guy. He was strategic, smart and very generous in his philanthropy. And he was an excellent businessman. Sometimes, people are born on third base and, when they cross home plate, believe they’ve just hit a home run. That wasn’t Herb Kohl. He took a successful local family business and turned it into a national giant. He contributed to Wisconsin as a public servant, a philanthropist and a businessman. I’m sorry he’s gone now, but he long ago cemented his place in Wisconsin history.