Author: Joanne Brown

Wednesday was the first meeting of our occasional governor’s new Wisconsin Commission on the Future of the Family, created “for the purpose of identifying issues and barriers relating to the overall wellbeing of families in the State, developing policies that lift individuals out of poverty, and developing and recommending polices…

This has mostly passed by the wayside already, attention spans being as limited as they are, but there has been a bit of a kerfluffle lately in the state supreme court regarding “Chief Justice” Patience Roggensack’s high-handed approach to her position. She has a penchant for rewriting court rules willy-nilly. The result…

Sometimes it pays to read the documents posted on the Wheeler Report, the long-time reporting service for state politics. That’s where I ran across this gem, a letter from the Assembly Republicans to the head of the Office of Refugee Settlement. In a self-satisfied and self-serving letter they ask that Wisconsin not…

How will the GAB replacement improve elections and ethics monitoring in Wisconsin? Answer: It won’t. In another blog post [Author’s note: this blog post has been removed, as I misread the legislation. As it stands, however, the replacement is bad enough!], I suggest that the GAB replacement will be partisan…

I hate to say I predicted this, but … This was the subject of one of my first blog posts here at Blogging Blue. The language in the budget enables the current proposed changes to the civil service in Wisconsin: The latest proposal won’t be released until next week but the…

We are told today in Politico about an emergency meeting yesterday that led to Scott Walker’s decision to suspend his campaign for President. According to the story, the meeting was called by Tonette Walker and Mike Grebe, and included Walker’s closest advisers, including veteran Walker hands John Hiller, Bill Eisner,…

Wow, where do these guys come from? Today I’m talking about Tom Tiffany and Andre Jacque, two of the most misguided legislators to hold office in Wisconsin in many years. Let’s start with Sen. Tom Tiffany (R-Hazelhurst). The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel published a piece about him recently, calling him a “lightning rod on environmental issues.”…

I have not commented before about the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s “decision” in the John Doe II case — I am still trying to pull together all my thoughts about it. But this morning I must register my astonishment at the excerpts of the letter to attorneys written by Justice Prosser…

Unbelievably, the Republicans have put the essential repeal of critical open records laws into their 999 budget motion. To wit: Section 28 of the motion provides that “deliberative materials,” i.e., the information created in the course of of developing legislation, would not be subject to state open records law. If…

The past week offered Scott Walker some great opportunities to demonstrate that he could be something other than the divisive and self-centered person we’ve come to know and loathe. But boy, did he miss those chances by a mile. There is no comparison between the graceful, gracious, and humane man…