The Catchup: RIP, Joe Lieberman & YSDA

The other day we passed 1,000 blogs here on YSDA. That got me to thinking. A nice round number like that just seems like a good one to go out on. So, today, we’re filing our last YSDA blog. Thanks to all of you for reading, for providing your insightful comments and even for taking strong issue with me when you thought I was wrong… which, of course, I never was.

Let’s go out with a bang. It’s time to catch up on stuff that happened last week.

RIP Joe Lieberman. Former Sen. Joe Lieberman was my kind of Democrat… which is to say not much of one. Even though he had been Al Gore’s running mate in 2000, Lieberman was essentially a center-left independent who didn’t mind taking positions that crossed party and ideological lines. He was pro-choice and a strong environmentalist, but he was also for a strong national defense and he was hawkish on foreign policy. What got him into the most hot water was his support for George W. Bush’s Iraq war. (I think he was wrong on that one.) That support so infuriated Connecticut Democrats that they denied him the party’s nomination when he ran for a third term in 2006. He then ran as an independent and won, after which he continued to caucus with the Democrats. Most Americans are like Lieberman — we more or less vote for one party or another but we are not party loyalists. We like to think for ourselves and we rebel at the notion that we’re supposed to meekly fall in line behind one party’s banner. That’s very American. Lieberman died at 82 on Wednesday. Rest in peace, Joe.

Take the quiz. Speaking of ideology, the New York Times ran an interesting story about how various AI programs evaluate a person’s political leanings. You can take a ten question quiz and see what the programs spit out for you. I took it and I have to say it placed me pretty much exactly where I would have placed myself on the political spectrum — as a moderate progressive. But it also placed me as slightly more authoritarian than libertarian while I think of myself as just the opposite. (These programs must be crushed!) And if you’d like to try a couple more of these labelling machines visit our Resources page and scroll down to The Quiz Show.

Get a job.. if you can. Ronna McDaniel hadn’t finished filling out her withholding forms and picking a health insurance plan when NBC fired her after only a couple days on the job. The network’s executives faced a firestorm of criticism from viewers and from their own on air commentators after hiring the former RNC chair who aided and abetted Donald Trump in his lies about the 2020 election. But in an effort to save her job she went on Meet the Press and admitted that she never believed that Trump had won or that the election was stolen. So, now she’s on the outs with Trump, et. al., and also out of a job at NBC. Why do I not feel bad for her?

The right decision. A Dane County jury didn’t take long to find Mark Wagner, a state Division of Criminal Investigations special agent, not guilty of reckless endangerment charges last week. The case against Wagner never seemed strong. In early 2022 he was among a small army of law enforcement agents who went to arrest Quadren Wilson, a violent career criminal and drug dealer (he has no less than 26 criminal convictions on his record). Wilson resisted arrest and Wagner thought he had a gun and was about to use it. So he fired two shots at Wilson and both missed. It turned out that Wilson was injured by shots fired from another officer, who was not charged, which is another bizarre twist in this case. Wagner was probably charged because Wilson is Black and so there was political pressure to pursue a case that was thin. On the other hand, police need to be held accountable for their use of force. but the system worked and the jury did the right thing.

Let’s keep failing. Wisconsin’s public schools are performing miserably (see the Madison school board nonendorsements below). Republicans had a bill, doomed from the start, that might have made a difference. It removed a series of requirements for school administrators that amounts to a fence-me-in system to assure that very systemic failure. Right now, to be a schools superintendent you have to be deeply steeped in the educational establishment with requirements for degrees in education and hours of teaching, etc. The bill would have stripped away those requirements so that any successful manager could run a school district. (In fairness, it went too far. It even removed a requirement for background checks and it should have included requirements for management experience at a high level. But the thrust of the bill was correct.) That would have widened the pool of potential candidates and offered the chance to bring in fresh ideas. We don’t need to look further than UW System President Jay Rothman, a lawyer and managing partner at the state’s biggest law firm before he took the job, to see how well this can work. Rothman is making tough and smart decisions in his role. If that’s good enough for the highest levels of education than why can’t it work at your local school district? It’s no surprise that Gov. Tony Evers, who is more deeply a part of the public schools establishment than any governor in Wisconsin history, vetoed it.

Our recommendations. Tomorrow’s election day. I’m the only person left in America who believes we should cut all the early voting stuff and go back to voting on one sacred day. Whatever. That train left the station hours ago. If you haven’t voted already, here’s our recommendations.

• If you’re a Democrat, vote for Joe Biden. Any other vote, or not voting, will be interpreted as supporting the hard-left view on Gaza. While we cringe at the carnage too, we think it’s clear that this is mostly Hamas’ responsibility. They started it and they could end it by freeing the hostages.
• If you’re a Republican, vote for Nikki Haley. Any voice, no matter how faint, against the hard-right Christian nationalism that Trump represents is a good thing.

• Vote for the constitutional amendment that would prevent private organizations from funding the administration of elections. Regardless of how you feel about Mark Zuckerberg, mixing private money with public dollars in running elections is just bad public policy. It’s not a good road to start down.
• Vote against the constitutional amendment that says only sworn election officials can run elections. That’s already the case and so I don’t trust Republicans for wanting to put this in the constitution. It’s unnecessary at best.
• If you live in Madison don’t vote for either of the incumbent school board members on the ballot. Their record is horrible. Low test scores, pathetic student attendance records, declining enrollment in the fastest growing city in the state, no progress on the achievement gap and a lack of interest in imposing good order in the schools. The latest piece of bad news comes from a Friday New York Times story on absenteeism. Yes, it’s bad everywhere, but it’s worse in Madison. Our chronic absenteeism was 3% above the national average before COVID. Now it’s nine points above the national average. These failing school board members are running unopposed, but don’t encourage them.
• If you live in Northeast Dane County’s 20th Supervisory District vote for Jeff Weigand. He’s the only conservative left out of 37 supervisors. No, we don’t agree with him on a lot of things, but it’s important to have at least one dissenting voice on a board that ranges from liberal to hard-left.
• If you live in the 34th Supervisory District around McFarland we recommend incumbent Patrick Miles. His challenger offers no change in policy direction but he does offer a willful distortion of Miles’ record. Let’s not reward him.
• If you live in Milwaukee vote for Evan Goyke for City Attorney. Goyke’s a solid guy who has an excellent record representing part of Milwaukee in the Assembly. His opponent, incumbent Tearman Spencer, has been a train wreck from day one.

And one last word with regard to that first paragraph… check your calendar. See you back here tomorrow.