Many of us know the first few caveats of the First Amendment for the United States Constitution — freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion. However, the last part of the amendment gives us the right to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
I wonder if the Founding Fathers intended for people to start a petition because they were peeved about how a piece of performance art ended. I kind of doubt it, but it would be kind of hard to ask one of them without the aid of a ouija board.
When so much about politics is partisan, one might expect a topic like police body cameras to be contentious, particularly as it relates to public access to recordings.
Proposed legislation to regulate the use of these cameras was approved by nine of the 10 members of the committee that produced it, and received unanimous support from the bipartisan Joint Legislative Council. The bill is now working its way through the Legislature.
Last year, another proposed bill to set rules for police body cameras drew concerns from open records advocates and others. Among other things, it would have required anyone who appeared in a body camera recording taken in certain locations to approve of the video’s release to the public. That would create new work for law enforcement and maybe keep too much information out of public view.
We are deluding ourselves if we think that exports alone will forge a viable future for America’s dairy farm families. We’ve had 25 years of steadily increasing trade, and look where it’s gotten us: 352 Wisconsin dairy farms lost in 2016, 465 Wisconsin dairy farms lost in 2017 and 691 Wisconsin dairy farms lost in 2018.
The “more exports” mantra is not getting the job done for America’s Dairyland. The sooner we start exploring some other options, the sooner we’ll start to turn the tide of devastating farm losses in Wisconsin and all across the country.
In addition to being insufficient to help family farmers, the current “produce all you want, and we’ll export the surplus” strategy articulated by U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue and others is phenomenally costly to taxpayers. Government spending on our current dairy insurance programs is expected to balloon to billions of dollars in the coming years.
Addressing our growing transportation needs has become a hotly-debated topic at the state and national levels. In Wisconsin, Gov. Tony Evers’ proposed transportation budget offers a responsible and urgently-needed path forward to address an issue that has been studied, debated, avoided and delayed for well over a decade.
One issue that’s no longer open for debate is the overall decline in pavement conditions. Anyone who analyzes pavement condition reports or regularly drives Wisconsin roads will come to the same unavoidable conclusion: pavement conditions across our state are worsening. Without prompt action, we can expect that trend to continue.
Many of the crime dramas you see on prime time television these days utilize facial recognition technology, where some tech pushes a button on the keyboard, and suddenly a million faces a second start flashing on a computer monitor until the match is found. Then the investigators bag the bad guy, and society is saved.
However, it’s a good thing none of those crime dramas are based in San Francisco. Otherwise, the series would either end abruptly or have a “very special episode” where the crimefighters learn a valuable lesson about facial recognition.
The California city is poised to ban facial recognition technology use by city or police officals, according to a NPR report that came out this week. The motive behind the madness is that facial recognition is unreliable when it comes to full accuracy. A study came out this year indicating mistakes were more likely when it came to matching the faces of women or anyone with darker skin.
It’s usually a given that when you try to offer goods or services, you want to provide them with a minimum of fuss or waiting. Most of the time, that holds true for businesses. However, 2019 is going to go down as the year when getting a reservation for Mother’s Day brunch went from being a simple task to being a process of elimination.
Since I’ve moved to Wisconsin, I’ve made it a tradition to take my mother to brunch, letting her enjoy some of the nice food that Shawano County has to offer. After the first year of not thinking about getting a reservation and finding my morning plans of whisking my mother away from the farm for a couple of hours now becoming a more lengthy affair as we waited in the foyer of The Woodland in Gresham, I quickly learned that it was much easier on everyone else if I called ahead and made plans.
President Abraham Lincoln believed that democracy is a form of government that is “by the people, of the people and for the people.” In a democracy, the government administers programs that are for the public good.
Presently, there are ideas being presented by some Democratic presidential candidates and members of Congress that have the interests of the majority of Americans in mind. These progressive programs have been identified by the term democratic socialism.
Throughout our history, there have been presidents who have truly cared for the people. These progressives strove for an America where people cared about each other, not just themselves, and acted with strength and effectiveness to help each other.
The founding fathers did not want a parliament, and they did not want a democracy. A concern of the founding fathers regarding a democracy was that emotion and passion could rule the day, resulting in mob rule. The founders wanted reason and law to rule the day.
The founders did not want a parliament because the leader and parliament are equal. They wanted the leader to be separate but equal to the elected representatives, providing a check and balance.
The founders wanted a representative republic, and the Electoral College is a critical part of this. In the Electoral College system, the voters vote for electors, and the founders wanted these electors to be property owners because they had something to lose.
Fraternities were once brotherhoods that served the community and were a group of people with common interests. You could have a fraternity of lawyers, a fraternity of doctors, even a fraternity of people who share a love of “Star Wars.” I don’t know if that last one is true, but it sounds intriguing.
Now, however, fraternities are the cautionary tale of college campuses. Many of them have devolved into groups of white guys who binge drink, harass minorities and treat women like pieces of meat. For the few that still believe in brotherhood and service, the bad groups are ruining their reputations, as well.
The latest fraternity scandal saw two fraternities at Swarthmore College disbanding as it was revealed that the group’s documents included evidence of racism, misogyny and homophobia. Swarthmore is a private liberal arts college in Pennsylvania.
So you are planning to vote for a Democrat who wants to turn this country socialistic. Have you taken a look at what happens to a country that goes that way?
The best-known socialist would probably be Vladimir Putin of Russia. About two years ago, the largest yacht ever built in Hamburg, Germany, was built for Putin. It is a beauty. Putin owns several villas, one of those is located in Spain. Google it and you will be in awe; it is fit for royalty.
The best-known socialist in the United States probably is Bernie Sanders. The internet just stated: “Bernie Sanders buys his third home, a $600,000 cottage on a lake in Vermont.”
