Political Heat

Indiana's Religious Freedom Restoration Act grants huge powers to business owners, allowing them to discriminate in dangerous, bold ways The backlash against Indiana’s new Religious Freedom Restoration Act is strong . It has undoubtedly taken some legislators in the state aback, opening some eyes to the amount of support for the LGBT community in the state and around the nation. The law grants businesses the right to refuse service to any patron on the basis of the owners’ religious beliefs. So a Christian florist could refuse to help a gay couple for their upcoming wedding. That opens the floodgates to other possibilities. Religious belief is a broad subject -- a person could well claim that their religious beliefs permit the exclusion of others based on their racial identity. Could, then, a restaurant refuse to serve a black family coming in that day, unaware of the racial bias that the owner has based on backwards religious tenets? The Indianapolis Star has editoriali...

Walker's solution to bad jobs results? Run for president. Another set of jobs numbers came out Thursday, and it's more sad news for Wisconsin . From September of 2013 to September of 2014 the state gained 27,491 private sector jobs. While the numbers show a positive jobs growth from year to year, Wisconsin fared much worse than the rest of the nation, ranking 40th out of the 50 states in terms of job creation. In the Midwest, Wisconsin was once again dead last during that time period . The latest jobs numbers are the second-worst set of third quarter reporting since Scott Walker became governor.  Data from Bureau of Labor Statistics In fact, Walker has yet to outdo the success of his predecessor , former Gov. Jim Doyle. In 2011's third quarter report -- a report that included nine months of Doyle's last budget and the first three months of Walker's first -- 41,461 private sector jobs were created. The difference between the most recent data and Doyle...

Clinton leads Bush, Christie and Walker by 55-40 margins If the election for president were held today former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would win. In a poll released by CNN earlier today , Clinton has leading numbers against every viable Republican challenger, including Jeb Bush (55-40) Chris Christie (55-40), Marco Rubio (55-42) and Scott Walker (55-40). That’s a huge uphill battle for Republicans to climb. With the presidential election just over 18 months away most GOP candidates vying to win the presidency are facing around a 15-point margin against the former First Lady . Why might this be? A lot of it has to do with name recognition. Clinton has a ton of it, bursting onto the national scene when her husband Bill became president in 1993. That’s more than 22 years of being in the spotlight. Many of these other candidates don't have half of that exposure at the national level. Another facet to her popularity over the Republican contenders is that the GOP no...

Let's commit to ending racial disparities, but let's also recognize the sacrifices that most law enforcement officers make If you have time this morning, read the Appleton Post Crescent’s recent editorial about the death of Tony Robinson. It’s a smart piece, and it gives real context to the debate overall. Here’s a quick excerpt , a response to the comments that the Post Crescent received on its stories about the situation: The word “thug” was tossed around and people talked about the value of one person’s life over another. Some unquestionably backed police officers and others said police never have good intentions. Few offered solutions. When we blindly repeat labels, nothing is accomplished. No matter what your thoughts, we can all look at the big picture: We want a more peaceful society. We don’t want to live in fear of criminals or police. I don’t believe that we need to “pick sides” in this conversation. There is a disproportionate amount of crime that seems t...

Lofty plans to run for president don't bode well with citizens in his home state Gov. Scott Walker’s latest poll numbers are out, and all indicators demonstrate that he’s not leading the state in the direction it wants to move in. According to a Public Policy Polling poll conducted recently , a majority of Wisconsinites, 52 percent, now disapprove of Walker’s job performance. Just 43 percent approve of his actions since the last election. When it comes to the presidency, most Wisconsin voters don’t want him to run -- and most would vote against him. In hypothetical match-ups against Democratic candidates Walker loses to Vice President Joe Biden (48 to 45), Sen. Elizabeth Warren (48 to 45) and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (52 to 43). Why the sudden change in Wisconsin? It’s clear that citizens of the state are not happy with the new budget and policy initiatives Walker has introduced since taking his second oath of office. Attempts to remove the Wisconsin I...

The officer-involved death raises concerns and outrage A young black man is dead under questionable circumstances in Madison. He was shot Friday night by a police officer on Willy Street on Madison’s near-east side. Tony Robinson, who just graduated from Sun Prairie High School and was planning to attend Madison College, was 19 years old. He was unarmed. According to reports , the police officer in question was responding to Robinson “jumping into traffic” on Williamson Street. He followed Robinson into the home where he was allegedly assaulted by the teen. It was then that the officer chose to use his gun to defend himself. Those details are fuzzy at best. No other information about the decision to enter the home, the extent of the alleged assault of the officer or whether lethal force was justified are being released at this time because the incident itself is being handled by an independent statewide agency designed to investigate all police-related deaths. The law, whi...

South Dakota removed it's 48-hour waiting period in 2009, and violent crime went up by 70 percent For forty years, a Wisconsin law requiring a 48-hour waiting period between the time a background check is performed to the time a person acquires a gun for purchase has been in place. And for forty years, that law has operated without a problem of any kind. No one has had an issue with the waiting period, besides those who have felt some minor inconvenience by it. Waiting two days for a weapon that can impose fatal bodily damage on another person doesn’t seem too cumbersome, and few would argue that it violates any personal liberties to require such a wait. Yet Gov. Scott Walker and several Republican leaders in the state legislature are aiming to eliminate the ban completely . ”We’ve been the leader when it comes to freedom over the last four years,” Walker said in the interview, citing Wisconsin’s passage of a concealed-carry law and another law that protects homeowners fr...

Legislation will stifle demand by lowering wages, lessening the influence of the consumer class Right to work (for less) legislation is being fast-tracked in the Wisconsin legislature. Having already passed the State Senate by a margin of one vote, the ALEC-written bill will undoubtedly pass the Assembly this week. Gov. Scott Walker is expected to sign the bill into law, despite promising that such a bill would never reach his desk during gubernatorial campaigns in the past. Many proponents of the bill suggest that it’s needed to boost job numbers in the state, citing studies that show RTW states producing more jobs than their non-RTW counterparts. These studies, however, fail to account for other factors , and are therefore flawed in their reasoning. The Center for Media and Democracy’s PR Watch explains (emphases in bold added): Economic development and job creation are complicated issues with many factors, and isolating the impact of right-to-work requires scientific rigo...