I turned 65 on Saturday. Medicare city, baby. I’m grateful for the coverage, but even for a guy who spent his career in and around government, I found the sign-up process to be over-complicated and downright befuddling at times. It was worse than trying to figure out how to get my iPhone to work.
Anyway, here’s some stuff I think I understand better.
Gothard wins national award, but will MMSD hire him? The Madison school board’s choice for its new superintendent now includes a candidate who just won national Superintendent of the Year honors and two candidates who were forced out of their last jobs after only two years. Last week it was announced that Joe Gothard, currently the St. Paul superintendent, would receive the national honor. Meanwhile, people who worked with Mohammed Choudhury in Maryland can’t believe anybody would hire this guy. Yvonne Stokes was asked to leave her job in the Indianapolis suburbs, though that appears to have had less to do with her performance than with a new political direction on that board. I would hope this would be an easy choice to pick Gothard, but with this school board you never know. Even if the board makes the obvious choice, the process and the search firm they chose have to be called into question. Only one really good candidate was selected out of an original field of 60. They couldn’t have come up with two more competitive options than Choudhury and Stokes?
Paranoia runs deep. When Republicans moved to adopt Democratic Gov. Tony Evers’ redistricting maps last week, the Democrats voted against them. They spun delusional yarns about how this was all a plot to set up a reversal in federal court. Actually, maps adopted by the Legislature and signed by the governor will be much more legally defensible than maps imposed by the state Supreme Court. They also came up with the whopper that this was about Speaker Robin Vos trying to fend off a recall election. Somehow, the Democrats figured that the new maps would help the recall and that’s why Vos insisted on a provision in the bill saying that they would not go into place until the fall primaries. That was a bizarre argument to begin with and it was put to bed with a memo from the nonpartisan Legislative Reference Bureau pointing out that Vos had nothing to do with the provision. It’s standard procedure to leave the old maps in place until the next election. Nobody requested it. The bill drafters simply put that in as a matter of course. Evers has said he’ll sign his own maps, but you gotta wonder about the quality of Democratic leadership in the Legislature.
Utilities buy votes. Speaking of bad Democratic leadership, that was on full display this week, not only with their goofy opposition to their own governor’s maps, but also in their selling out of consumers in a bill that all but eliminates competition in the building of expensive power lines. The “Right of First Refusal” bill fences in two Wisconsin companies, ATC and Northern States Power, for all power line construction here. No out-of-state companies need apply. That means no competition and higher prices for ratepayers. The utilities contributed lavishly to both party’s campaign coffers and bought their votes fair and square. You’d expect that from the GOP, which has always supported utility investors over customers, but the Democrats were once champions of consumers. We’ll have more to say about this tomorrow.
Manchin’s a mensch. Sen. Joe Manchin announced over the weekend that he would not run as a third party spoiler after all. He had been flirting with the group No Labels and went so far as to talk openly about potential running mates, so dropping out before he ever actually dropped in was a bit of a surprise. But good for him. Probably. It looks like No Labels might have hurt Joe Biden more than Trump, though that was open to question. Nonetheless, while Manchin has been appropriately critical of both parties, there’s little doubt where he stands. “So many good friends of mine, so many people I thought were there to do the right thing, they cowered to former President Donald Trump’s request not to fix the border,” Manchin said. “As guilty as Joe Biden is for letting it happen, Donald Trump is ten times worse for not letting us fix it.” The Democrats made all the progress they did in the last four years because Manchin held a seat in a state, West Virginia, that voted for Trump by 36 points in 2020. Yeah, he’s more conservative than I am, but Democrats who attacked him just didn’t get it. Nothing would have passed without him.
Yellow Stripes & Dead Armadillos 