Wisconsin Judge Rules Some Parts Of Anti-Union Act 10 Unconstitutional

(Permanent Musical Accompaniment To The Last Post Of The Week From The Blog's Favourite Living Canadian)

Way back in the Before Time, when the shebeen was new and shiny and the spittoons were less than full, one of our prime accounts was the resistance to what was being done to its beloved state of Wisconsin by Scott Walker, the goggle-eyed homunculus hired by Koch Industries to manage this particular Midwest subsidiary. Walker's primary weapon was Act 10, a law passed through his pet gerrymandered state legislature, which allowed him to break public sector unions. Act 10 also was the reason that thousands of people turned up on the grounds of the state capitol day after day. One group that particularly fascinated me was the Solidarity Sing Along. They've shown up at the capitol daily to sing songs that reminded Wisconsin of its long history of progressive government that Walker and his mob worked so hard to bury. On Thursday, a Dane County court gave the singers a new tune to sing. From the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel:

Several unions representing public employees filed the lawsuit in November 2023, citing a "dire situation" in workplaces with issues including low pay, staffing shortages and poor working conditions. Dane County Circuit Judge Jacob Frost in May considered a motion from the state Legislature to dismiss the case, promising a ruling "in the near future." Frost, who was appointed to the Dane County Circuit Court in 2020 by Democratic Gov. Tony Evers, appears to have signed a petition to recall the former Republican governor over the law. His signature appears on the petition next to an address he lived at in 2011 before Frost was a judge, according to property records. The immediate implications of Frost's order are unclear.

Of particular note is that the decision is premised on Walker’s native political cowardice. Act 10 was specifically designed to exempt police and fire unions both because he needed them for political muscle, and because he found it easier to bully teachers and social workers than to bully the cops. Judge Frost called him on that.

"Rational basis review provides a simple premise. Can you explain a law’s differing treatment of different groups in a way that makes sense and supports a public policy? If not, the different treatment is irrational and violates the right to equal protection of the laws. Because nobody could provide this Court an explanation that reasonably showed why municipal police and fire and State Troopers are considered public safety employees, but Capitol Police, UW Police and conservation wardens, who have the same authority and do the same work, are not," Frost wrote in his ruling.

There will be appeals and appeals and it likely will end up before the state Supreme Court, which now has a Democratic majority. Payback is quite the female dog. Sing, you sinners!

God bless Julie K. Brown of the Miami Herald. She is still dogging the slime trail that Jeffrey Epstein left through the nation’s elite. To me, Brown’s greatest contribution thus far has been to ferret out the details of the sweetheart plea deal that kept Epstein out of prison. It was negotiated by Alex Acosta, who by mysterious circumstance ended up in the cabinet of El Caudillo Del Mar-a-Lago.

Then recently, while most of the elite political media was playing gerontologist, more documents from the extended Epstein litigations were released. Oddly enough, the presumptive GOP nominee’s name appears on the flight logs of Epstein’s jet. Oddly enough, now that he is, you know, an adjudicated sex criminal.

Palm Beach County Judge Luis Delgado unsealed the controversial grand jury records on Monday after years of legal action by the Palm Beach Post and other media, including the Miami Herald, CNN and the New York Times. Grand jury records are normally kept under seal to protect witnesses as well as the integrity of the case. But in the years since the Epstein case was closed in 2008, the Miami Herald uncovered evidence suggesting that Epstein and his battery of high-priced attorneys may have exerted undue influence over the state attorney...

Epstein’s case came under new scrutiny in 2018 — 10 years later — following a series of articles by the Miami Herald that outlined the secret negotiations that led Alex Acosta, the federal prosecutor who later oversaw a federal probe, to approve a light jail sentence for Epstein. Epstein would serve just 13 months in the Palm Beach County jail, where he was given liberal privileges to work in his outside office and at his Palm Beach mansion. After his release from jail, he continued to assault and abuse women at his homes in New York, New Mexico, Paris and on his isolated island off the coast of St. Thomas.

It seems to me that some of the current feeding frenzy might be directed in, ah, other directions.

Weekly WWOZ Pick To Click: "Sunny Afternoon" (The Kinks)—Yeah, I pretty much still love New Orleans.

Weekly Visit To The Pathe Archives: Th 1950s were a time of great innovation and invention. Here, from 1959, is a gentleman with an inflatable garage. This is not a Python routine. This is a man with an inflatable garage. My question is where in the hell does he keep his lawnmower? History is so cool.

President Lincoln would like a word before the holiday weekend is over.

At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide. I hope I am over wary; but if I am not, there is, even now, something of ill-omen, amongst us. I mean the increasing disregard for law which pervades the country; the growing disposition to substitute the wild and furious passions, in lieu of the sober judgment of Courts; and the worse than savage mobs, for the executive ministers of justice. This disposition is awfully fearful in any community; and that it now exists in ours, though grating to our feelings to admit, it would be a violation of truth, and an insult to our intelligence, to deny.

That was in 1837. In 1855, he wasn't feeling any more optimistic.

I am not a Know-Nothing. How could I be? How can any one who abhors the oppression of Negroes be in favor of degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me pretty rapid. As a nation we began by declaring "all men are created equal." We now practically read it, "all men are created equal, except Negroes." When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read "all men are created equal, except Negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics." When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty--to Russia, for example, where despotism can be taken pure and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.

Discovery Corner: Hey, look what we found! From Archaeology Magazine:

The sticks are made of Casuarina wood and were each found fixed in miniature fireplaces. Using chemical analysis, researchers determined that the sticks had been smeared with animal or human fat. According to nineteenth-century ethnographer Alfred Howitt, GunaiKurnai mulla-mullung, or medicine man or woman, performed a ritual using Casuarina sticks. Howitt described how the mulla-mullung would tie an item belonging to a sick individual to the stick, smear it with fat, and then stick it in the ground and light a fire beneath it before chanting the sick person's name. "For these artifacts to survive is just amazing. They're telling us a story," said GunaiKurnai Elder Uncle Russell Mullett . "A reminder that we are a living culture still connected to our ancient past. It's a unique opportunity to be able to read the memoirs of our Ancestors and share that with our community."

Australian prehistory is on of the more fascinating fields for discovery. Now, we’ve discovered an ancient free clinic and BBQ joint. BBQ has healing properties. We all know that.

Hy, Clarion-Ledger, is it a good day for dinosaur news? It's always a good day for dinosaur news!

It's been identified as a hadrosaur; a member of a family of similar dinosaurs, and it roamed what is now Northeast Mississippi about 82 million years ago. It was an herbivore measuring 25-26 feet long and when standing on its back legs was about 16 feet tall.

Its fossilized remains have been stored for years, but now a University of Southern Mississippi graduate student is working to solve the mystery. "This thing sat for a while because we didn't have anybody to work on it," said James Starnes of the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality's Office of Geology. "They're called duck-billed dinosaurs."

"There's hundreds," said USM geology graduate student Derek Hoffman. "They're the most well-represented dinosaurs in the fossil record, without a doubt. The research I'm doing is the identification of this hadrosaur." Without the skull, the pubis, a bone from the front of the pelvis, became the next best thing. Differences between pubis bones between the species are subtle, but when compared can help identify the different species through a process known as geometric morphometrics.

They lived then to make us happy now, Mississippi, goddamn.

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. Watch out for the damn bird flu. And spare a moment for the good people in the fire zones in California, in the hurricane’s wake in the Caribbean, Mexico and (maybe) Texas And in south Florida, which is now a lagoon only Martha-Ann Alito could love, and the people in similar peril in the upper Midwest, and in Mexico, and for the people of Iowa and across the Plains states who have been living under the gun of all the tornadoes, especially the folks in Texas, who are staring down the barrel again this weekend. And for the people of Baltimore, and for the people of Israel and of Gaza, the people of Ukraine, of Lewiston, Maine, and for the victims of monkeypox in the Republic of the Congo, 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 Tanzania and Kenya, 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 areas in Dubai (!) and in Pakistan, and in the flood zones in Russia and Kazakhstan, and in the flood zones in Iran, where loose crocodiles are becoming a problem, and in the flood zones on Oahu, and in the fire zones in Oregon, and western Canada, and 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.