(Permanent Musical Accompaniment to the Last Post of the Week from the Blog’s Favourite Living Canadian)

I know we spend a lot of time in the shebeen talking about politics in Wisconsin. There are a number of reasons why, and that’s not even counting the fact that I spent five years of my life there and became very fond of the place. But when the state elected Scott Walker to govern it almost coincidentally with the opening of this shebeen, its Republicans worked overtime to reverse the state’s historic dedication to innovative, progressive politics, a tradition going back a century or more. Ever since, Wisconsin Democrats have been fighting to regain the ground progressive politics won in the years immediately preceding World War I. This fight has been precisely microcosmic in relation to the political struggle in the nation at large.

All that being said, it was a busy week in America’s Dairyland. First, Governor Tony Evers, who rid the state of Walker, vetoed a bill that likely would have opened the state to unlimited child labor. From the Wisconsin Examiner:

In his veto message, Evers said he opposed “eliminating a process that ensures our kids are protected from employers that may exploit youth and inexperience or subject children to hazardous or illegal working conditions.”
While parents and guardians can apply online directly for a work permit on behalf of a 14- or 15-year-old, backers of the legislation eliminating them argued that the work permit requirement added needless bureaucracy and intruded on parents’ rights. “The state does not need a hand and every single thing that we do as parents, they don’t need to help us raise our children in every single way,” said Rep. Amanda Nedweski (R-Pleasant Prairie) during the Assembly floor debate in February. “This bill simply removes the state from the parenting process where they do not belong.”

The rights of the parents to send their preteen into the chicken plant to lose a limb shall not be infringed upon.

In addition, another multi-gazillion-dollar state Supreme Court campaign seems to be aborning. Right now the Democrats have a one-vote majority in that body, which has been quite consequential over the past year. Now it looks like they’re going to have to fight to keep it again. From NBC News:

The April 2025 election to replace [Ann Walsh] Bradley promises to be an expensive and bitter race and will likely feature many of the same momentous issues—like abortion rights and redistricting—that defined a 2023 Wisconsin Supreme Court race that ultimately gave liberals their first majority on the bench in 15 years.
The election for Bradley’s seat will come two years after liberal Janet Protasiewicz defeated conservative Dan Kelly in what was the most expensive state Supreme Court race in U.S. history and one of the most closely watched elections of 2023. The race was largely defined by Protasiewicz’s support for abortion rights and opposition to the state’s heavily gerrymandered legislative maps—two issues that were set to come before the court. During the campaign, conservatives criticized Protasiewicz for having taken public stances on divisive political issues. Following her win, some Republicans in the state threatened her with impeachment.

Central to that doomed and useless effort was state assembly speaker Robin Vos. Vos, alas, has his own problems these days with a claque of Trumpian dead-enders who want to recall him because Vos somehow didn’t do enough to steal the state out from under President Biden in 2020. Luckily for Vos, these are not the brightest bulbs in the Mar-a-Lago chandelier. From Wisconsin Public Radio:

Commissioners voted 5-0 to reject the petitions, following the recommendation of staff who work at the state’s elections agency. “It really boils down to an arithmetic problem,” said Commissioner Bob Spindell, a Republican appointee. “Commission staff looked at it from every single angle, and no matter which angle they looked at, the petitions were woefully short.”
Under Wisconsin’s recall law, organizers needed to gather a number of signatures from residents of Vos’s district equal to 25 percent of the number of people who voted in the last election for governor. That number varies from district to district. In Vos’s old 63rd Assembly District—which was struck down by the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s liberal majority as unconstitutional along with the rest of the old legislative maps—6,850 signatures would have been needed to force a recall. According to a review by WEC staff, organizers gathered only 4,989 signatures, falling well short of the mark.

The Trumpian forces responded with their usual dispassion.

Commissioners also heard from former Justice Michael Gableman, an attorney for the recall effort who has been at odds with the powerful speaker for the past two years. In 2021, Vos hired Gableman to lead an investigation of the 2020 election, a decision he has since said was the worst mistake he’s made since becoming speaker. In 2022, Gableman campaigned for Vos’s Republican primary opponent. Gableman argued the recall effort had been intentionally sabotaged by people who wanted it to fail. “It was infiltrated by outsiders from New York and Florida,” Gableman said. “That’s been reported to the FBI.”

I’m sure the Bureau was overjoyed to hear it. The second attempt to recall Vos is already under way.

At this writing, I don’t know what this is all about, but most of the possibilities are not good. From The Texas Tribune:

“According to law enforcement, this appears to be an intentional, criminal act and the Texas Rangers will be leading the investigation,” [Lois] Kolkhorst wrote on a social media post. “This deliberate, heinous act is a reminder of the dangerous work done by our law enforcement and licensing agencies that work to provide public safety and services. Please join me in praying for the innocent victims and their families at this time.”

The fact that local law enforcement was so quick to call the crash deliberate means that the witnesses on the ground and the people in the building were sure it was. Motive is unclear. It might be some twisted politics, or it might just be a private gripe.

Neighboring Montgomery County Judge Mark Keough said in a Facebook post that the suspect had been denied the license on Thursday. “He returned today with intent to harm,” Keough said. “Continued prayers for the DPS staff, troopers and civilians affected.”

This country needs a time-out. Badly.

Weekly WWOZ Pick to Click: “Five Guys Named Moe” (Louis Jordan): Yeah, I pretty much still love New Orleans.

Weekly Visit to the Pathé Archives: Here, from 1970, is a tragedy from New Mexico. A family ate pork from pigs fed grain contaminated by mercury, and several members of the family were crippled. The Hucklebys were briefly a cause célèbre for the nascent environmental movement. Even The New York Times went out to Alamogordo to do a story on them, and on the dangers of mercury in the food chain and water supplies. With the environmental movement being, ah, nascent at the time, the courts were no help, either.

Anxiety among health authorities reached all the way to Washington, where Federal officials were already worrying about a possible national threat from industrial mercury discharged into lakes and rivers and picked up by fish. But Federal efforts to intervene have so far been unsuccessful. When the Department of Agriculture sought in February to stop all sales of methyl mercury as a potential hazard to public health, a Federal District Court ruled that the Government's attempt to prove the dangers of the substance had been so vague that suspension of sales was not justified.
A three‐judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Chicago agreed and went on to criticize the Government’s presentation. It said that the department had not even tried to prove what form of methyl mercury had caused the Hucklebys’ illness. Furthermore, the court said, judging by the department's evidence “the Alamogordo incident was a freak occurrence” resulting from negligence. The Government has since petitioned for a hearing by the full appeals court.

History is not always so cool, but it remains important.

At the risk of repeating myself, at this writing, I don’t know what this means, but many of the possibilities are very bad. From Reuters:

Asked by reporters about his message to Iran, Biden said simply, “Don’t,” and he underscored Washington’s commitment to defend Israel. "We are devoted to the defense of Israel. We will support Israel. We will help defend Israel and Iran will not succeed,” he said. Biden said he would not divulge secure information, but said his expectation was that an attack could come “sooner, rather than later.”
He spoke to reporters at the White House after a virtual speech to a civil rights conference. Israel braced on Friday for an attack by Iran or its proxies as warnings grew of retaliation for an attack on Iran’s embassy compound last week in Damascus that killed a senior commander in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps’ overseas Quds Force and six other officers.

Has everybody involved in this current Middle East fiasco completely lost their minds? Somebody blows up the Iranian embassy in Syria? Not without reason, Iran blames Israel and rattles its sabers. The U.S. rattles its sabers even more loudly. This is beginning to reek of Sarajevo in 1914. One slip, one sweaty finger on a button, is all it’s going to take. At the very least, the U.S. should stop pouring weapons of war into Israel, for a while anyway. I’ve stopped believing in cooler heads prevailing.

Discovery Corner: Hey, look what we found! The Vikings, even weirder than their hats. From Smithsonian:

“While both forms of body modification have received wide attention in other cultural contexts,” they continue, “the specific expressions of these customs in Viking Age society still lack systematic investigation in terms of their social implications.” The researchers examined the remains of 130 men with “horizontal furrows” carved into their teeth, many of whom were found on the Swedish island of Gotland. They also analyzed three cases of modified skulls, all belonging to women on the island.

Oh, those crazy Norsemen.

Wow, cool. Free goats!

Hey, CNN, is it a good day for dinosaur news? It’s always a good day for dinosaur news!

“People usually think that Indigenous people weren’t aware of their surroundings or didn’t have any kind of scientific spirit or curiosity,” said study coauthor Leonardo Troiano, an archaeologist at the Institute of National Historic and Artistic Heritage in Brasilia. “But that’s not true. It’s very clear that they were interested in the footprints. We’ll never know if they knew about dinosaurs, but it is clear that they were curious about the prints and thought they were meaningful in some way.” The Serrote do Letreiro petroglyphs aren’t the first examples of rock art found close to dinosaur prints, but the authors of the study said they believe that the unprecedented clarity of the association between the two at this particular site could have significant implications across paleontology, archaeology and cultural heritage studies.

I think the carvings eventually will be translated into “They lived then to make us happy now,” even nine thousand years ago.

I’ll be back on Monday for whatever fresh hell awaits. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snake line. Wear the damn mask. Take the damn shots, especially the boosters, and especially the most recent boosters. And spare a moment for the good people of Baltimore, and for the people of Israel and of Gaza, the people of Ukraine, of Lewiston, Maine, and of the earthquake zones in Taiwan, Iraq, Turkey, Morocco, and Colombia, and in the flood zone in Libya, and the flood zones all across the Ohio Valley, and on the Horn of Africa, and in the English midlands, and in Virginia, and in Texas and Louisiana, and in California, and the flood zones of Indonesia, and in the storm-battered south of Georgia, and in Kenya, and in the flood zones surrounding this very keyboard, and in the flood zones in Russia and Kazakhstan, and in the fire zones in Australia, and in north Texas, and in Lahaina, where they’re still trying to recover their lives, and under the volcano in Iceland, and for the gun-traumatized folks in Austin and at UNLV, and in Philadelphia, and in Perry, Iowa, and especially for our fellow citizens in the LGBTQ+ community, who deserve so much better from their country than they’ve been getting.

Headshot of Charles P. Pierce
Charles P. Pierce

Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has three children.