A tad chilly out there. Might want to grab a light jacket and cap before venturing out today. Or to put it in terms of the morning news shows, One hundred million people under threat of dying horrible, painful deaths from exposure! Panic! Run for your lives!
Let’s set aside the pending disaster and do what we do on Mondays and catch up on the news.
The revolving door revolves again. Wisconsin Public Service Commission Chair Rebecca Valq announced her resignation last week. Valq had a long career representing Wisconsin’s largest utility before being appointed by Gov. Tony Evers to regulate that utility among others. Now she will, no doubt, return to the other side of the table, armed with even deeper knowledge about how to game the system for her client.
Fired for the wrong reason. Also at the PSC, commissioner Tyler Huebner was rejected by a Senate committee. If that recommendation is followed by the full Senate, Huebner would essentially be fired from a job he’s held for three years. Huebner also has a glaring conflict of interest, having lobbied for renewable energy in his previous job. We’re not against renewables — quite the opposite — but wind and solar are now a big part of utilities’ portfolios, so in a sense he was a pro-utility lobbyist as opposed to being an advocate for consumers or for neighbors opposed to solar or wind farms or power lines. Huebner had lobbied for the massive Cardinal-Hickory line on the grounds that it could bring in wind energy from the West. But that’s not why the Republicans on the committee voted against him. One of the members said that Huebner didn’t have an “all of the above” approach to energy, meaning he favored alternatives over fossil fuels. That’s not a sufficient reason to fire him. That view simply reflects the policy choice of the governor who appointed him.
The menu of maps. No less than seven sets of maps have been submitted to the Wisconsin Supreme Court in response to their decision to nullify the current legislative district lines and to draw new ones. As predicted here and in other places, all of the maps reduce the Republicans’ gerrymandered advantages, but still project Republican majorities in both houses, albeit in some cases very small ones. The maps will now be analyzed by two court-selected academic experts, with reports to be submitted back to the court by February 1st. If I were the court liberals I’d select one that narrows the GOP advantage without running afoul of rules that might open it up to being overturned by SCOTUS.
The Left v. the Hard-Left. Speaking of SCOTUS, it has agreed to take a case out of the Ninth Circuit (the West Coast) that is likely to clear the way for cities to use anti-vagrancy laws to fight homelessness. Incredibly (well, not so incredibly for the famously lefty Ninth Circuit) that court ruled that enforcing laws against camping in city parks was cruel and unusual punishment. Now, San Francisco Mayor London Breed and California Gov. Gavin Newsom are asking SCOTUS to reverse that ruling. It’s another example of the growing divide between main stream liberals and the hard-left.
Heroes and victims. Finally, it’s Martin Luther King Day, a day on which we celebrate the life of a true American hero. In recent years the hard-left has confused heroes with victims. Martin Luther King, Jr., was a hero. George Floyd, and locally Tony Robinson, were victims. And, in Robinson’s case, he was a victim of his own recklessness. King is remembered for what he did while Floyd is remembered for what was done to him.
Yellow Stripes & Dead Armadillos 