"Yeah, that's crap," said Governor Tony Evers, accused of encouraging state employees to break federal law.

"That's what they would say no matter what. We're not encouraging them to break the law. In fact, one of the things that ICE is arresting people for, we're seeing all that, frankly, is not law-breaking. And then what do you do? So I think having caution right up front I think is important. Think about the farmers in the state of Wisconsin, they have all sorts of undocumented people.... And you know if Donald Trump starts going after them, we will become a shadow of the state we are right now. We're not taking any rights away from ICE. They run the show. We just want to make sure there's an attorney there, see the documents, what's going on, can we do this someplace else rather than our place of work, and make it more reasonable?"

Quoted in "Gov. Evers says 'not encouraging' state employees to break the law in new ICE directives/Evers talked with 'UPFRONT' in a wide-ranging interview during the NFL draft in Green Bay" (WISN).

Sometimes the conditions are right for liberals to see the value of the structural safeguard called federalism. 

"The sentence, dull but clear, was buried 158 pages into Wisconsin’s budget. 'For the limit for the 2023-24 school year and the 2024-25 school year,' the sentence read..."

"... when it was passed by the Republican-controlled Legislature, 'add $325' to the amount school districts could generate through property taxes for each student. But by the time Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, and his veto pen were finished, it said something else entirely: 'For the limit for 2023-2425, add $325.' It was clever. Creative. Perhaps even a bit subversive, extending the increase four centuries longer than lawmakers intended. But was it legal? On Friday, the Wisconsin Supreme Court said yes. In a 4-to-3 ruling in a lawsuit challenging Mr. Evers’s use of his partial veto authority, the court’s liberal majority said the governor had acted legally. The three conservative justices on the court dissented...."

From "Wisconsin Supreme Court Says Governor’s 400-Year Edit Was Within Veto Authority/Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, used his veto power to increase school funding limits for four centuries longer than Republican lawmakers in the state had intended" (NYT).

Elon Musk holds Tony Evers up for ridicule.

Messed up https://t.co/jaQhFe2U1H

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 21, 2025

ADDED: An effect of A.I. that I noticed in myself upon seeing this tweet: I immediately asked Grok if Evers was running for reelection and who might run against him. Without A.I., I'd have let it go.

Replete with cheeseheads and "Jump Around"...

Wisconsin weighed in at the convention:

I don't know why Governor Tony Evers had such trouble getting the words out, but what does it matter? The votes were cast, and the votes were not real anyway.

Nice to see Ben Wikler by his side.

As for the convention in general, no, I did not watch. Maybe I'll take a look at the Obamas speeches on YouTube... or just look at the transcripts... count how many times they said "hope" or something.

ADDED: I scrolled right to Wisconsin and felt good about hearing "Jump Around," but I see that all the states got their popular song. Here's a full list. Because they went in alphabetical order, Alabama was first, and the song is a song that used to make lefties cringe: "Sweet Home Alabama."

"Whoever wins—Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, Vice President Harris, or anyone else—would be more coherent and more persuasive than Trump."

That's my favorite sentence in "Time to Roll the Dice/Biden’s party doesn’t need to sleepwalk into a catastrophe," by Anne Applebaum in The Atlantic.

Until now, I had not seen the name of our Governor in any of the replace-Biden discussions. Why not? He's a very low key calming presence. Example:

"The Wisconsin ad doesn’t show Mr. Evers until the end. It focuses on solar projects, which the ad says will power 750,000 homes in the state."

"'Governor Evers is working with the Biden administration to do even more,' the ad’s narrator says as photos are shown of Mr. Evers and Mr. Biden touring a Milwaukee factory last summer. 'Your home value goes up and your energy bill goes down.' The ad concludes with footage of Mr. Evers’s annual State of the State address.... Because Evergreen is technically an issue-advocacy organization, it is prohibited from making an explicit push to vote for Mr. Biden, but the message here is not subtle.... ... Evergreen is seeking to remind voters that something they like — ... using solar power in Wisconsin — is brought to them by the Biden administration. Less than six months out from the presidential election, Mr. Biden has failed to convey that message to voters, leaving supportive outside groups and Democratic governors to do it for him."

From "Climate Group Is Running Ads on Biden Policies in Wisconsin and Michigan/The group, which has ties to Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington, has a $1 million plan for TV spots playing up the president’s record on green power" (NYT).

1. "Mr. Evers" is the unflashy personage who serves as Governor of Wisconsin, Tony Evers. He appears in the last 5 seconds of the ad... in all his low-key glory.

2. $1 million spent on TV ads seems too trivial to be warrant a NYT article. Is it an effort to cheer readers up: $1 million to the rescue? Or is this a gentle raising of the alarm: "Mr. Biden has failed...."? 

"[Democratic Governor Tony] Evers signed the bill despite pressure from powerful Democrats in the state to veto it."

"When the bill made its way through the legislature, Democratic lawmakers opposed it nearly uniformly, citing concerns... about possible future legal challenges to the legislative maps and general distrust of the Republican legislators who agreed to the law’s passage. 'If you believe that WI Republicans are planning to run on Gov. Evers’ maps in November, I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you,' wrote Democratic state senator LaTonya Johnson on the social media site X. But it’s not clear exactly what those legal challenges would look like. 'I am extremely skeptical of this idea that there is a good basis for challenging the law, really on any grounds,' said Quinn Yeargain, a legal scholar who focuses on state constitutional law. 'I’m as much of a partisan Democrat and progressive as anybody else is, but being intellectually honest about what’s going on here is also important.'... The maps were heralded by anti-gerrymandering activists in Wisconsin as a win...."

From "Wisconsin adopts new legislative maps, giving Democrats chance to win state/Governor’s signature marks end of long fight over legislative lines and greatly reduces the Republican bias baked into current maps" (The Guardian).

"Wisconsin's Democratic governor opposes keeping Republican Donald Trump off the ballot in the battleground state, saying that those who think he should be disqualified 'can vote against him.'"

Channel 3000 reports.

Gov. Tony Evers also told The Associated Press in an interview Wednesday that in order for President Joe Biden to win Wisconsin, he must be a frequent visitor to the state and focus his message on his successes and issues that matter to the middle class, not just the argument that the fate of democracy is at stake.

Good for Tony. I appreciate his attitude. 

He was "one of those guys who was like Eddie Haskell."

Said a woman who had worked with Joshua Pleasnick at the the Green Owl restaurant on Madison’s East Side. "When the owner was not around, he would talk all kinds of smack about her and other women in general..."

Joshua Pleasnick is the man in "Man with handgun seeking governor arrested in Wisconsin Capitol, returns with assault rifle" (Wisconsin State Journal). 

The shirtless man (shirtless men rarely make history):

"Gov. Tony Evers, a former public school educator, used his broad partial veto authority this week to sign into law a new state budget that increases funding for public schools for the next four centuries."

"The surprise move will ensure districts' state-imposed limits on how much revenue they are allowed to raise will be increased by $325 per student each year until 2425...."

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports. 

The veto power in this state is very intense: "Evers crafted the four-century school aid extension by striking a hyphen and a '20' from a reference to the 2024-25 school year." That is, "2024-25" became "2425."

I'm not seeing this term in the article, but traditionally, we've called this the "Frankenstein veto." The state constitution was amended in 2008 to restrict what used to be even crazier.

ADDED: The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has a new article: "Can he do that? Tony Evers followed a Wisconsin tradition when he increased school aid for 402 years." This one uses the term "Frankenstein veto":

At one time, governors could veto individual words to create new words — known as the Vanna White veto — or strike words from two or more sentences to make new sentences, known as the Frankenstein veto. Voters eliminated governors' ability to make such changes in 1990 and 2008, respectively.

So what's left, what Evers used, doesn't deserve the "Frankenstein" disparagement?

I'm only noticing now — and only because "Madison" is trending on Twitter — that Joe Biden flew into Madison yesterday.

A line of nearly 20 cars waited to catch a glimpse of Air Force One Wednesday morning as it landed in Madison. https://t.co/EWAAtG2gNe

— NBC15 News (@nbc15_madison) February 9, 2023

Waiting on the tarmac for @POTUS! pic.twitter.com/1n9xcnhEfs

— Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway (@SatyaForMadison) February 8, 2023

The day after the State of the Union, President Biden landed in Madison, Wisconsin and visited the Laborers' Union. Hell yeah he did. Thanks for coming to the best district out there (WI-02) @POTUS pic.twitter.com/NaOFrW7wK0

— Dane Varese (@DaneVarese) February 9, 2023

I wrote "flew into Madison" because the plane landed in Madison, but the event was at the LiUNA Laborers' Training Center in DeForest. 

Know your Madison-area landscape:

"If Wisconsin Democrats lose several low-budget state legislative contests here on Tuesday... it may not matter who wins the $114 million tossup contest for governor ..."

"... between Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, and Tim Michels, a Republican. Those northern seats would put Republicans in reach of veto-proof supermajorities that would render a Democratic governor functionally irrelevant.... The Republican leaders in the Wisconsin Legislature say they will bring back all 146 bills Mr. Evers has vetoed during his four years in office — measures on elections, school funding, pandemic mitigation efforts, policing, abortion and the state’s gun laws — if they win a supermajority or if Mr. Michels is elected."

From "Wisconsin Republicans Stand on the Verge of Total, Veto-Proof Power/In a 50-50 battleground state, Republicans are close to capturing supermajorities in the State Legislature that would render the Democratic governor irrelevant even if he wins re-election" (NYT).

The northern seats are "three counties in Wisconsin’s far northwest corner make up one of the last patches of rural America that have remained loyal to Democrats through the Obama and Trump years... Douglas, Bayfield and Ashland Counties."

Independent women now favor the Republicans by 18 percentage points, when last month they favored Democrats by 14 points.

That's a 32-point turnaround. How the hell could that happen?!

That's from the new Times/Siena poll, discussed in the NYT article "Republicans Gain Edge as Voters Worry About Economy, Times/Siena Poll Finds/With elections next month, independents, especially women, are swinging to the G.O.P. despite Democrats’ focus on abortion rights. Disapproval of President Biden seems to be hurting his party." 

The NYT says that's "a striking swing given... how intensely Democrats have focused on that group and on the threat Republicans pose to abortion rights."

Obviously, one explanation is that the polls are massaged and the direction of the massage changes as we get closer to the election. That would mean the earlier poll was more about shaping opinion, and the new poll, so close to the election, needs to approximate what will actually happen in the election, so the pollsters won't lose credibility. We've all heard that explanation.

But a 32-point turnaround in one month — that's so huge!

"Self-proclaimed political outsider Tim Michels will face Democratic Gov. Tony Evers in November..."

"... after defeating his primary challenger Rebecca Kleefisch in Wisconsin's heated GOP gubernatorial primary Tuesday. Despite entering the race in late April, more than six months after former Lt. Gov. Kleefisch, Michels rode a surging campaign into Tuesday’s primary thanks in part to an endorsement from former President Donald Trump, who held a rally supporting Michels in Waukesha County on Friday....  While stumping for Michels in Waukesha County on Friday, Trump described Kleefisch as 'the handpicked candidate of the failed establishment, the "RINOs."'...  Evers' campaign manager Cassi Fenili [said]... 'The Republican Party has chosen the most extreme and divisive nominee possible, one that will tell Donald Trump anything just to keep his endorsement... From abortion and voting rights, to gun safety and public education — Tim Michels has staked out the most extreme positions possible, with the goal of dividing our state and pitting neighbors against one another.'"

The Wisconsin State Journal reports.

Tomorrow is Juneteenth, the newest national holiday: How should we celebrate it?

I'm not sure if "celebrate" is even the right word.

When I google my question, I also see "honor." How do we "honor Juneteenth"? People must sense that "celebrate" is wrong — too festive, too joyful and fun? — because they're not seeing that it's wrong to speak of "honoring" a holiday. It's not the holiday that is honored, the holiday honors something, and you wouldn't say you are honoring the honoring. 

At CNN, I'm seeing "Ways to celebrate and serve Juneteenth." Serve? Is the holiday our master? Juneteenth marks an escape from servitude. Why would we — how would we — serve this occasion? And yet we often speak of observing a holiday. I take a long break to research the prefix "ob-" in the Oxford English Dictionary.

But enough about language. The question is are we going to celebrate Juneteenth?

"... Democrats, nationally and in Wisconsin, [are] divided over how much to emphasize their own police-friendly credentials and how much to stick to the racial justice movement..."

"... that erupted anew in 2020. [Governor Tony] Evers, for example, has unilaterally funneled more than $56 million in federal funds to law enforcement, a move that enables him to circumvent a legislative maze controlled by Republicans who some Democrats worry are hesitant to give Evers a win in an election year.... But Rep. David Bowen, a Democratic state legislator who represents Milwaukee and is running for lieutenant governor... worried that moving too quickly away from police accountability would sour voters on Democrats who promised change... The National Republican Senatorial Committee recently attacked Wisconsin Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes — one of the Democrats who hopes to challenge Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) in the fall — for refusing to say whether he still supports cash bail.... The ad said Barnes 'also refuses to oppose defunding the police.' Barnes’s campaign declined to comment for this article. One of the earliest campaign ads for Rebecca Kleefisch, one of the Republicans trying to unseat the state’s Democratic governor, begins with an image of Kenosha in flames. 'One year ago, Kenosha burned while Tony Evers failed to lead,' Kleefisch says in the ad, at one point walking past a boarded-up business. 'Lives were lost, and small businesses were burned because our governor sided with rioters over the people of this community.' Strategists for both sides say it is too early to predict for certain which issues will be salient in a midterm election six months from now and whether crime will still be a top concern."

From "In Wisconsin, a complex debate on crime foreshadows a midterm fight" (WaPo).

"Vandals set a fire inside the Madison headquarters of the anti-abortion group Wisconsin Family Action late Saturday or early Sunday..."

"... police and an official with the group said Sunday. Investigators are calling the fire an arson.... [T]wo staff persons from the group arrived at the office... to find shattered glass from a broken window covering a corner office riddled with burned books.... A Molotov cocktail, which did not ignite, was thrown inside the building, according to police. It also appears a separate fire was started in response, police said.... [Democratic Gov. Tony Evers tweeted] 'We condemn violence and hatred in all forms, including the actions at Wisconsin Family Action in Madison last night... We reject violence against any person for disagreeing with another’s view.... We will work against overturning Roe and attacks on reproductive rights by leading with empathy and compassion. We will defend what we believe in with our words and our voices — in the streets, in halls of government, and at the ballot box.'"

From "Madison anti-abortion headquarters hit by apparent Molotov cocktail, vandalism, graffiti" (Wisconsin State Journal).

The terrorists left graffiti on the outside of the building — the words "If abortions aren't safe then you aren't either" and the anarchy symbol alongside the number 1312 (which stands for the slogan "All Cops Are Bastards").

"In a per curiam (unsigned) opinion on the shadow docket, over the dissent of Justices Kagan and Sotomayor, the Supreme Court has rejected a redistricting plan that a divided Wisconsin Supreme Court had adopted..."

"... for drawing state assembly and senate districts.... The [Wisconsin] court adopted the [Democratic] Governor’s maps, and those maps added another majority-minority district around Milwaukee. The governor added this district saying it was required by the Voting Rights Act... The Supreme Court’s opinion today says either the Governor or the Supreme Court misapplied the Supreme Court’s VRA and racial gerrymandering precedents... The state supreme court should have considered under strict scrutiny 'whether a race-neutral alternative that did not add a seventh majority-black district would deny black voters equal political opportunity.'... [T]he Court used a case in an emergency procedural posture to reach out and decide an issue.... It decided these issues in ways hostile to minority voting rights without giving a full opportunity for airing out the issues and pointing out how this will further hurt voters of color."

Writes Rick Hasen at Election Law Blog.

Here's the opinion. 

Why do only Sotomayor and Kagan dissent? What about Breyer? From "The Supreme Court’s Astonishing, Inexplicable Blow to the Voting Rights Act in Wisconsin" by Mark Joseph Stern at Slate

Only Sotomayor and Kagan noted their dissents; it’s possible that Justice Stephen Breyer dissented as well, but chose not to note it. (This opacity is a perennial problem with the shadow docket.) He may have simply decided not to publicize his disagreement—choosing, perhaps, not to rock the boat months before his retirement. It is difficult, if not impossible, to believe that Breyer agreed with the majority, since he has publicly opposed its approach to the VRA in innumerable cases.

If you ever find yourself wondering, Am I the only one who..., the answer is no you are not. There is always someone else.

That's what Meade asserts — and I presume he's not the only one who asserts that. If he could say it, someone else has also said it. You're never the only one.

The specific occasion for the assertion of this immense generality was a discussion of yard signs on view in our neighborhood as we were driving home from the sunrise run this morning. We noted that the Black Lives Matter signs are nearly all gone, for whatever reason. The only persistent signs are anti-gerrymandering, perhaps because there's serious hope of affecting legislation, with help from Tony Evers. (Evers, the governor, is a Democrat, but both houses of the Wisconsin legislature are run by the GOP.)

I mention Evers, and I have to add, "Say it, say it!" which I do to escape the very mild fake annoyance I would experience if Meade said what he always says — or used to always say — which is: "Tony is the little man who lives inside my mouth and tells me what to do." I added, "Do you think you're the only one who whenever he hears the name Tony Evers says 'Tony is the little man who lives in my mouth and tells me what to do'?"

The government — in failing to maintain order in Kenosha — deserves blame for the Kyle Rittenhouse incident.

Here's something you may have missed. I missed it until today, when I was listening to the new episode of the NYT podcast "The Daily": "The Acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse/How a jury came to find the teenager, who shot and killed two people in Kenosha, Wis., not guilty on the five charges he faced."

The episode covered the entire trial. What jumped out at me wasn't the show's focus, but it mattered to me because I care about what government can do to protect citizens from each other.

None of the shootings by Kyle Rittenhouse would have occurred if Joseph Rosenbaum hadn't behaved in a deranged manner. Presumably, Rosenbaum would have done better if he had taken his medication, but he couldn't get his prescriptions filled because the pharmacy was boarded up — closed, because of the riots.

I'm reading more about his condition — here, in The Washington Post — and I see that the plastic bag he threw at Rittenhouse was a small collection of items — deodorant, underwear, socks — that the hospital had given him when he was discharged after a suicide attempt. That's what he had (and lamely threw at Rittenhouse). What he lacked was his drugs: "Hours after he was released from the hospital, Rosenbaum stopped by a pharmacy in Kenosha to pick up medication for his bipolar disorder, only to discover that it had closed early because of the unrest." 

They released a mentally ill man into a chaotic city with a prescription for medication that he could not fill. A suicidal man proceeded to get himself killed at the hands of Rittenhouse and to unleash the ill-fated rush to stop Rittenhouse. There are immense and unknowable costs to letting a city decline into chaos. 

Rittenhouse and every other individual — except a truly deranged person, such as, perhaps, Rosenbaum — are responsible for his own actions. We tend to focus on the actions of other human beings, and the trial was a spectacle commanding us to focus on Rittenhouse. The government puts on that show, and that show distracts us from the failings of government. 

"Why Didn’t [Wisconsin Governor] Tony Evers Prevent the Carnage in Kenosha?" John McCormack asked (in National Review, while the jury was deliberating):

On the afternoon of Sunday, August 23 — three months after the murder of George Floyd and the riots it sparked — a Kenosha police officer shot African American Jacob Blake. The shooting was far more complicated than initial reports indicated: Blake had a knife, resisted arrest after being tasered, and was reaching into his car when he was shot.... But the video of the incident almost guaranteed that riots would occur without decisive action....

That evening, instead of deploying the National Guard to Kenosha, Evers sent out an inflammatory tweet suggesting that police may have behaved “mercilessly” in their encounter with Blake. “Tonight, Jacob Blake was shot in the back multiple times, in broad daylight, in Kenosha, Wisconsin... While we do not have all of the details yet, what we know for certain is that he is not the first Black man or person to have been shot or injured or mercilessly killed at the hands of individuals in law enforcement in our state or our country.” 

A few hours later, 100 cars were torched in Kenosha.

It wasn’t until the next morning, August 24, that Evers called out the National Guard — and even then he sent only 125 guardsmen to Kenosha, which has a population of just under 100,000. That night, arsonists set fire to dozens of buildings in the city. On Tuesday, August 25, Evers sent another 125 members of the National Guard. But that evening, the Washington Post reported, law-enforcement agents were “overwhelmed” by rioters and “the only visible law enforcement presence was around the Kenosha County Courthouse, where an 8-foot-high fence was erected around the building, with about 1,000 protesters gathered outside the barrier.” 

Evers had turned down an offer of federal support earlier that day. “I have no regrets because the only thing I said no to was Homeland Security and I knew that would not work out because of what I saw in Portland,” Evers said after the fact. Evers has defended his minimal deployment of guardsmen by saying, “We have fulfilled every request that the leadership in Kenosha have asked for.”....

Evers is at fault and so is the leadership of Kenosha. 

ALSO: More government responsibility for chaos in Wisconsin: "Milwaukee County DA admits it was a mistake to grant $1,000 bail to SUV-driving felon days before he smashed into Xmas parade: Darrell Brooks was freed after running over mother of his child and is now charged with homicide after killing five" (Daily Mail).