Author Archives: dave cieslewicz

Of the 16 school districts in Dane County only one performs worse than Madison. To quote a Wisconsin State Journal story on test scores that were released yesterday: “The four specific categories used to calculate the district’s overall achievement score all declined in comparison with last year’s school report card. Graduate rates fell slightly, whileContinue reading “Madison Schools Keep Failing”

It just doesn’t make sense. Let’s say you’re like me. You love the environment. In fact, maybe you’ve contributed to environmental causes or even, as I did, had a career in the movement. Of course, these days you’re very concerned about climate change. And you live or have a place up in the North Woods.Continue reading “The Line 5 Scam”

So, here’s a question for my liberal Democratic friends. If we’re on the side of people of color and the working class, how come they’re leaving us in droves? And if your answer is that they’re just too dumb to know who their real friends are, well, see, there you go again.  Let me offerContinue reading “Failure in One Word: Latinx”

This week’s quote comes to us from none other than House Speaker Mike Johnson. Referring to the completed, but unreleased, House Ethics Committee report on Matt Gaetz. Johnson said: “I’m going to strongly request that the Ethics Committee not issue the report, because that is not the way we do things in the House, AndContinue reading “The Q&Q For 11/16/24”

The other day Mike Maierle wrote a piece for YSDA analyzing the numbers behind Kamala Harris’ defeat. It was headlined Where Harris Lost Support. Today we’ll ask why she lost it where she did. What was most striking to me was that Harris, a Black woman, lost support among women and Blacks (though not amongContinue reading “Why Harris Lost Support”

Eric Hovde is giving us a little, inconsequential, second rate taste of what we would have gotten had Donald Trump lost the election. Trump made it clear that he would only accept the results of the election if he won. Had he lost, we’d now be mired in baseless allegations of voter fraud and aContinue reading “Hovde a Loser Twice Over”

With rare exceptions, Kamala Harris lost support across demographic groups compared to Joe Biden. In this guest column, Mike Maierle — who spent a career as a transportation and neighborhood planner and public transit manager and who delights in wonky analysis spiced with the occasional wry aside — does a fascinating deep dive into theContinue reading “Where Harris Lost Support”

Yesterday I offered a pretty bleak assessment of where things are at. My point was that societies are closing down all over the world and turning over power to corrupt authoritarians, like Donald Trump. It has happened before in history when more educated urban elites grow much richer and far more culturally progressive than theContinue reading “A Moderate Dem Party”

It’s okay, even necessary, for a political party to do some soul-searching when it loses as badly as my party did last Tuesday. But let’s make a distinction between sober reflection and finger-pointing.  I will not point a finger at any person. I’ll blame history. I’ll get to that in a bit, but first letContinue reading “The Chasm”

We’ve been pawing through the post-election analysis (which takes on various forms of “I told you so” and “if only they had listened to me”) and this morning we provide you with excerpts from three of the takes we found most insightful. Well, okay, so it’s basically the same take expressed by three different writers.Continue reading “Insufferable Liberals”