Author Archives: dave cieslewicz

This may be my favorite week of the year. In the three days before Thanksgiving things are quiet. Here, I don’t mean the news. There’s news every day coming out of the once and future President. I’m trying to ignore that as best I can. I mean there’s a quiet in our souls. Okay, letContinue reading “A Good Week”

Today we’re going to depart from our usual format of the Quote & Quiz. Instead of offering a quote, the YSDA investigative team has obtained a copy of the Trump transition team’s questionnaire for potential cabinet picks. We quote it below. A) Trafficking under-age girls for sex. B) Raping a woman in a department storeContinue reading “The Q&Q For 11/23/24”

Deer hunting is mostly about anticipation and memory.  Hunters dream about and plan for their hunt for months in advance. Then they spend much of their deer camp evenings telling stories of what happened or what might have happened during their day alone in the woods. When those stories are exhausted they move on toContinue reading “Deer Stand Improvements”

When I was Mayor of Madison I wanted to have cabinet government, just like the governor has at the state level. My argument was that a chief executive at any level deserved to have his own team in place to implement the policies he was elected to pursue. Instead, the city operated like most citiesContinue reading “Matt Gaetz: Yes Man”

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”