This is one of my favorite times of the year. Reuben sandwiches made from leftover St. Paddy’s Day corned beef and lots and lots of college basketball. And when I can pull myself away from the couch, the trout fishing is very good.
Let’s see what else has been going on.
A win for consumers. Despite spending a fortune on lobbyists and campaign contributions two massive Wisconsin power line builders — ATC and Xcel — didn’t get what they wanted out of the Legislature. What they wanted was to freeze out their competitors from other states. A bill that would have given only those two companies the right to build all the power lines in the state passed the Assembly, but died in the Senate when that body adjourned on Friday. Two groups should be happy with that outcome: consumers and all those lobbyists, who can look forward to more big pay days next session.
Render unto Caesar. In what could be a landmark ruling with national implications, the Wisconsin Supreme Court eroded the tax exemption enjoyed by churches. The court ruled that some organizations affiliated with the Catholic Church don’t have a mission that is clearly religious enough to justify the exemption as it related to unemployment insurance taxes. I’ve never understood the religious exemption at all, especially as it relates to property taxes. It’s supposedly based on separation of church and state, which I’m all for, but why is it that churches are only kept separate from paying for services but not separated from receiving services, like police service, fire service, snow plowing, street maintenance, etc.? I’d get rid of the whole unholy exemption. Caesar’s got bills to pay too.
Ticked at Tik Tok. Here’s a generational thing. Not only do I only vaguely know what Tik Tok is, I just can’t bring myself to learn or care about the damn thing. What I’ve picked up from headlines and the first paragraph of stories I’ve read is that this is something that is really important to young people, the Chinese and Congress. One thing I do care a lot about is the First Amendment, so I wonder how you can ban a social media platform, which is just another device for communicating ideas, in the United States. Yeah, the Chinese, AI, whatever, I know. But I don’t get how this would work practically or how it would overcome a constitutional challenge.
How can anybody vote for this guy? In a speech in Dayton on Saturday, Donald Trump referred to migrants as something less than human in yet another echo of Hitler’s language that has cropped up in his speeches for the last several months. He said, among other things that would have been embarrassing even for a middle schooler, “I don’t know if you call them ‘people,’ in some cases. They’re not people, in my opinion.” He later referred to them as “animals.”
Six more years! Speaking of authoritarians, Vladimir Putin just won another six-year term with 87% of the vote. In another story out of Moscow, the Russian health ministry reports that 13% of Russians are at risk of death from blunt force trauma and food poisoning.
Those gentle, self-aware bald eagles. Sometimes NPR is laugh out loud funny, and without even trying. On Saturday they ran a story about a pair of bald eagles and an eagle activist was quoted as saying: “They just show us how to live life and live it from a place of peace and patience and compassion for what happens and still being who they are.” For me that brought to mind thoughts of the eagle on my dock last summer patiently dismembering a rabbit, though I’m not sure the rabbit felt that it was an act of peace or being done with much compassion. But the eagle was very much being who he/she/they was.
Yellow Stripes & Dead Armadillos 