Glenn Grothman: Taxcutter as Deadbeat Dad.

Hi folks,

In an opinion piece for the Journal-Sentinel last week, Glenn complains that funding 4 year old kindergartens is a bad way to improve educational performance.

From the Journal-Sentinel: "Be leery of government 'helping' your children"
Glenn begins this way,

The most important function of a society is raising its children. And with American high school students doing poorly on international tests, it's tempting to accept any new suggestion to improve our educational system.

I'm startled, frankly, that Glenn believes society should have any hand at all in raising children, but, now that he's said it in print, I'm more hopeful.

American high school kids are performing horribly on international tests. Glenn finally looked at the reports showing -- ready? -- that by the 12th grade, US students only outscore "Cyprus, Lithuania and South Africa in math."

This scares the hell out of me, but Glenn doesn't seem too worried about it. He's repeatedly slashed away at the kind of responsible funding for education that would have invested in our economic future by keeping our kids competitive with the rest of the industrially developed world.

Even more glaring is this comment at the end about working mothers:

It is easy to forget that, while most mothers with preschool children now work, only a minority of them work full time and leave their children with strangers. For the rest of our lifetimes, the left will continually say that the more the government cares for the children, the better off the children will be. I doubt that the founders of this country would have believed that.

Funny he should mention The Founders of this county. My particular favorite had a comment about this:

“I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion.” Thomas Jefferson, 9/28/1820

We do that by making sure each child gets a great education. We have to educate each child as if they might become President -- or a State Senator. Because, they might.

Otherwise we'll get the leaders we deserve.

Period.

While it's obvious that throwing money at a problem doesn't solve it, cutting off most of its funding doesn't fix it either. Glenn's entire life, etched boldly on his vanity license plates, is about cutting off funding to 'wasteful' programs like -- apparently -- education.

That's why this "opinion" piece was soaked through with enough hypocrisy to give me a migraine.

Look:

• You can't slash the number of employees in your business to save money and then complain that service isn't as good as it should be.
• You can't cut the number of doctors in a hospital to save money and then complain that the care isn't as good as it should be.
• And you cannot cut school system funding and then complain that they are doing a bad job.

But here's what else I know:

1) Slashing funding to the high schools, whether in MPS or elsewhere, punishes children who don't deserve to be punished. You don't make students smarter by stuffing more students into a classroom. Trying to punish the teachers who refuse to vote for him, only hurts the children.

And

2) Slashing funding to students you are obligated to help, is equivalent to abandoning your family.

Thinking like this makes Glenn the deadbeat dad of tax cutter, refusing to keep up child support.


hiho
Mpeterson

Glenn Grothman: wrong on clubbing his alma mater to death?

"The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers" says Rep. Frank Lasee, R-Green Bay ...

-- whoops, I mean William Shakespeare in Henry VI Act IV, Scene II.


Or, since they won't let him do that, how about this?

The Janesville Gazette reports

Tired of lawyers, lawmaker wants to cut law school's funding

MADISON, Wis. - A lawmaker who persuaded the Assembly to eliminate all state funding for the University of Wisconsin law school says his reasoning is simple: There's too many lawyers in Wisconsin.

That and soon to be ex-Rep. Lassee might have thought to consider that the UW law school is the only state university law school in Wisconsin. Well, here:

More than 14,000 Wisconsin residents are practicing lawyers, according to the American Bar Association, which puts the state in the middle of the pack nationally for its overall number of attorneys.

Davis said the law school has educated many political and business leaders and was proud of its record.

Its alumni include former Gov. Tommy Thompson, six out of seven state Supreme Court justices and several of Lasee's colleagues. Two of them - Rep. Mark Gundrum, R-New Berlin, and Rep. Sheryl Albers, R-Reedsburg - voted for the budget that slashed their alma mater's funding.

And, I put this up in here because Sen. Grothman is also a product of tax-payer subsidized education at the UW Law school.

Does Glenn believe that future students should have to pay a massively larger share of their education than he did? That it was okay for us to subsidize his education, but not future students?

Just checking. I guess we'll find out.

hiho
Mp

Glenn sighting: now at Wikipedia.

Hi folks,

Discovered Glenn's entry at Wikipedia.


Sic transit gloria.


hiho
Mpeterson

Glenn Grothman: wrong on the ethics of birth control.

Hi folks,

Back after a break and catching up.

Back on May 16th the Wisconsin Radio Network reported that Glenn had voted against some emergency contraception legislation. I'm still astonished by Glenn's vote.

They reported:

No one spoke against the bill, which passed 27-to-6. Juneau Republican Scott Fitzgerald was among the "no" votes. "Ultimately, it's still a question of conception and life," said Fitzgerald. Also voting against the bill were Republican Senators Glenn Grothman, Dan Kapanke, Neal Kedzie, Mary Lazich and Joe Liebham.

Middleton Democrat John Erpenbach chaired a committee which heard testimony on the bill. He noted only one group opposed the it. Pro Life Wisconsin, said Erpenbach, is "against . . . all forms of contraception." Fitzgerald cited the group's stance in explaining his vote. "Pro Life Wisconsin had a little bit different take on it than Right to Life and the Catholic Conference and certainly Planned Parenthood," said Fitzgerald. The bill requires hospitals inform rape victims of emergency contraceptives and make the morning after pill available to them. Prospects are unclear in the Republican controlled state Assembly.

I assume that Glenn agrees with the position of Pro Life Wisconsin, one of his biggest supporters. If I'm wrong about that, let me know!

Here's the problem: Pro Life Wisconsin believes that any kind of birth control -- anything that prevents conception -- is a kind of before-the-fact abortion and cannot be ethically sustained. The principle here is that anything which prevents a human being, even a potential one, from becoming an actual human being, is immoral. This includes abortion, clearly, but also emergency contraception and even condoms. Ironically, if you accept the idea that preventing conception is always wrong, the same logic would hold that even abstinence is immoral since it too prevents the conception and creation of an actual human being.

Maybe this is why people like Leah Vukmir and Glenn keep voting to guarantee the rights of rapists to force their victims to conceive.

When you start getting screwy answers like this, it's time to go back and recheck your original principles for cracks. They're usually the problem.

Your mileage may vary.


hiho
Mpeterson

Glenn Grothman: still wrong for helping rapists.

Hi folks,

Ah, the end of another semester ate the last few weeks, and Glenn has been relatively quiet, but here is the latest: a NO vote for providing rape victims with emergency contraception. [I actually feel a little bad about taking him to task this way since we had a nice phone conversation last week -- but I'd feel worse about letting him get away with it. ;^)]


Here are some of the details:

Posted at the Cheese-O-Sphere:

But originally from
By SCOTT BAUER
Associated Press Writer

MADISON, Wis. (AP) - Hospitals would be required to provide the so-called morning after pill to rape victims under a measure that passed the state Senate on Wednesday and has the backing of Gov. Jim Doyle.

[snip]

Those voting against the proposal Wednesday in the Senate were Republicans Scott Fitzgerald of Juneau, Glenn Grothman of West Bend, Dan Kapanke of La Crosse, Neal Kedzie of Elkhorn, Mary Lazich of New Berlin and Joe Leibham of Sheboygan.

Preventing pregnancy in the case of rape seems obvious to me. Voting against this idea, and I've said this before, seems to be helping the rapist finish the job. Those who believe that emergency contraception is a kind of abortion simply haven't considered the question of human life carefully enough to speak intelligently about it.

hiho
Mpeterson

Glenn Grothman: can't win.

Hi folks,

I nearly fell over when I read March 24th's West Bend Express News. The "From the Hill" column -- where our local politicos say what's on their minds -- included an article from Glenn Grothman with the headline: Reviewing the tech schools.

Apparently the recent Legislative Audit Bureau report showed that:

[During] the past nine years, their (sic) property tax levy for technical schools has gone up an average of 6.6 percent per year -- well above the rest of your property tax bill.

And, therefore, Glenn concludes:

It's no wonder your tech school property tax bill is going through the roof.

The Technical colleges provide Wisconsin citizens with the kind of instruction that improves their lives, and provides Wisconsin manufacturers with the skilled labor force that helped us hold on to jobs here decades after the rust belt swallowed Detroit and Gary and Ohio.

We may need to "review" funding levels as the state undergoes a conversion to a knowledge-based economy. We'll have to figure that one out.... but ...

But what I'm really wondering is how someone with the word "tax cutter" abbreviated on his license plate missed roughly $783,000,000 (783 million dollars) a year in state income tax, sales tax, and property taxes?? Did $783 million just fly under his taxcutting radar?

During all the years of his Taxpayer's Bill of Rights shenanigans, how did he manage to miss it??


Inquiring minds want to know.

hiho
Mpeterson

Glenn Grothman: wrong on educational budgeting.

Okay, so I'm really harping on this wage thing.... but we've all been really really good sports about this for some years while Sen Grothman -- allegedly our representative -- has had a field day ragging on us.


From Milwaukee Magazine:

The study found the average base salaries of technical college teachers in Wisconsin are “among the highest reported nationally.” It also found average annual earnings of the technical college teachers exceeded those of full-time faculty at two-year University of Wisconsin Colleges by a jaw-dropping $22,000.

[...]

But Milwaukee has turned things completely upside down: Average faculty earn more ($89,850) than administrators ($86,556) at MATC.

I've been working here for the UW Colleges for 15 years, I have a PhD from one of the better universities on the planet, I love my job, get good student evaluations and, most importantly, provide a great deal in higher ed for the taxpayers, my real bosses.... and these tech school faculty earn on average $39,000 more a year than I do?

Doesn't that seem like a lot?

I note it in passing.

Okay, I think I'm done now.

hiho
Mp

Glenn Grothman: wrong on education, again.

Hi folks,


A recent story in The Capital Times describing the lousy state of UW System faculty salaries -- something I'd suspected but hadn't been able to substantiate -- and the attendant legislative shenanigans.

Here are the juicy bits. For the entire article, follow the link:

David Olien: UW salary woes come as no surprise
By David Olien, March 19, 2007

Wednesday's edition of The Capital Times reported the results of a legislative audit revealing that generally faculty at the state's technical colleges are paid more than those on University of Wisconsin campuses.

[...]

...Wisconsin's legislators rank among the best paid in the nation when you examine their salaries, their generous per diem payments, their sick leave conversion privileges and their participation in the Wisconsin Retirement System.

[...]

Legislators indicating surprise at the audit finding are being disingenuous. The fact is UW System personnel and campus chancellors have been telling legislative leaders, members of Joint Finance and the rank and file for well over a decade that UW System faculty have fallen far behind their national peers. It should be no shock that faculty have been leaving UW two-year campuses for the technical colleges for over a decade. Legislators were also informed of that fact when the situation first developed.

[...]

For faculty at the two-year UW college campuses, the results were even worse, with a gap of over $12,500 annually behind national peers at the full professor rank, $9,000 at the associate rank and $10,000 at the assistant professor rank.

Not to mention that my salary trails the average UW system associate prof salary by about 8,000 -- and the tech school average by 11,000. I like my job, but that still seems like a lot to me sometimes.

Glenn gets a lot of the blame. For years he's railed against the UW System to make himself look like a neo-conservative purist and caused our little campus no end of grief -- even while hypocritically claiming to represent the residents of Washington County who benefit from our presence -- and while collecting, it now turns out, a pretty good salary.

He's used the excuse of university excesses, when there weren't any, to slash away at taxes for ideological rather than practical reasons.

The Devil is always in the details. Maybe Glenn can challenge him to a fiddling contest and have Charlie Daniels record it.


hiho
Mpeterson

Glenn Grothman: wrong on Tommy Thompson??

Hi folks,

Another installment of "When ideological purity trumps common sense."

Here's what Glenn said this week -- about Tommy Thompson this time.

[The former Governor was missing from last week's Conservative Political Action Conference beauty contest for the Republican presidential candidates.]

Craig Gilbert in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel online writes:

"I think it's a great year for a dark horse," said Wisconsin state Sen. Glenn Grothman, referring to the "question marks" conservatives have about the frontrunners.

Asked whether Thompson could be his conservative "dark horse," the West Bend lawmaker said, "I'm looking for a conservative. . . . Tommy's not a conservative."

Tommy's not a conservative?


I'd love to try, but there's no way I can top this.

hiho
Mpeterson

Glenn "Jethro" Grothman: wrong on Hispanic history.

Hi folks,

Real life and work caught up with me during most of January and February but Glenn, as always, is still busy embarrassing Washington County.

There is a back(b)log [a blogjam? :^)] of nonsense , but here's the latest -- you've probably already seen it.

In an interview with WKOW TV Glenn managed to get a headline that reads: Grothman: ''Why in the world would we give preferences to Hispanics?

"I think our society is used to giving preference to African Americans," Grothman told 27 News. "But why in the world would we give preferences to Hispanics, who've just come here? Perhaps we could remove preferences for those people."

The Capital Times replied with West Bend should be ashamed of Sen. Grothman's views. Here's part of that reply:

One can read into these idiotic words in many ways. Clearly, however, the words are xenophobic and to some degree reflect the views and opinions of some, if not most, of the people in West Bend he is, after all, their representative. [...]

The senator from West Bend joined in the debate sounding like Jethro from "The Beverly Hillbillies." To amplify his backwoods knowledge, West Bend's gifted son stated that "historical, racial prejudices have declined, obviating the need" for any policy aimed at helping disadvantaged minorities in the state. Wow! According to state Sen. Grothman, Wisconsin has achieved a colorblind society.

Is there no shame in West Bend? [Robert Miranda]

We should remember that lies never hurt nearly so much as the truth. Does this sting because it's a lie, or because it's the truth? I worry that Mr. Miranda nailed it. [For more, thoughtful response, see Caffeinated Politics.]

Apparently, Glenn never figured out why we (all of us, not just some disembodied evil guv'rmnt) why we might want to make getting into college more than a matter of whether you went to a properly funded high school.

That's ashame. There are perfectly good reasons.

On the other hand, this is just another example of the same mentality that thought it was a good idea to put millions of federal dollars at stake by de-listing that damned garter snake -- just so one of his friends could put up a fence.

Still, he flip-flopped on that vote. Maybe he'll flip-flop on Hispanic history too.

But wait, does this mean that he's flip-flopped on African-American history? It looks like he's no longer opposed to MLK day -- at least, not in public.


hiho
Mpeterson

Glenn Grothman: an imprudent approach to garters.

Hi folks,

Oh and about the Butler's Garter snake: JCRAR voted 7-2 to rescind the order removing the snake from the threatened species list. What was interesting to me about this is Glenn's voting with the majority against his earlier point of view.

He told the Journal:

Sen. Glenn Grothman (R-West Bend), a critic of the DNR's handling of the issue, said he was satisfied that the agency was making progress to accommodate private landowners.

This was all true earlier in the summer. Were the people he'd previously, and bizarrely, dismissed as "so-called" scientists suddenly right? and -- anyway, oh heck. See the previously posted catalogue of Glenn posturing.

Anyway, breathe easier for the little guys. What's good for Butler's Gartersnake is good for Wisconsin -- including our children and grand children.

This sort of thing is yet another example of a lack of either prudence or temperance in Glenn's manipulation of the legislative process.


hiho
Mpeterson

Glenn Grothman: missing email address.

Hi folks,


I'm tickled to tell you that Glenn took the trouble and time away from finding new ways to cut government services to the people of Washington County in order to send me a big package of documents including:

• a page of his office stationery
• his business card
• a page from the West Bend Daily News Opinion page (including the usual full spread of political opinions available in our local press, from neo-con Bill "Shut up!" O'Reilly, all the way over to the even more neo-con Owen "B&S" Robinson) and, of course,
• one of the freebie DOT maps he hands out with a Glenn Grothman State Senator sticker stuck on it...

...all with Sen.Grothman@legis.state.wi.us neatly underlined or highlighted -- exactly the address I posted in the comments to the previous message.

Which is darned nice... and darned nice of Glenn to point out that he is accessible in email.

-- but I should note that his email address is still not up in the legislative email address page.

So Glenn, what up with dat?

Oh never mind. It's just a little wrinkle anyway.


I'll be back with the promised bit about Glenn not being a real, traditional American conservative in the next post, later this week.

Keep the faith. Back in a bit.

hiho
Mpeterson

Glenn Grothman: cutting off his constituents.

Hi folks,

Sorry I've been busy. I've been reading John Dean's new book Conservatives without Conscience, and it's confirmed a lot of things I had already started to believe. For instance, the reason why I've never been able to understand the reckless non-conservative character of today's neo-cons is that I've been trying to understand them politically instead of psychiatrically. Now, finally, even Senator Grothman makes sense to me.

Anyway, there's more Butler's Garter snake stuff inbound, since the committe is going to have to bust a hump to cause whatever damage they can before they lose the majority in January -- but here's something I noticed, just in passing.

Glenn is one of a handful of Senators who do not have an email address.

He must be too busy.


Here's the listing from the Email directory for the Wisconsin State Legislature.

District Number 13

Senator Scott Fitzgerald Sen.fitzgerald@legis.wisconsin.gov
(608) 266-5660 Capitol 317 East

Staff:
Judi Rhodes-Engels judi.rhodes-engels@legis.wisconsin.gov
Tad Ottman Tad.Ottman@legis.wisconsin.gov
Mike Prentiss Mike.Prentiss@legis.wisconsin.gov
Cindy Block Cindy.Block@legis.wisconsin.gov

---

District Number 20

Senator Glenn Grothman
(608) 266-7513 Capitol 20 South

Staff:
Amy Gehrke Amy.Gehrke@legis.wisconsin.gov
Jolene Churchill Jolene.Churchill@legis.wisconsin.gov
James Emerson James.Emerson@legis.wisconsin.gov
Regina Kolbow Regina.Kolbow@legis.wisconsin.gov

---

District Number 30

Senator Dave Hansen Sen.hansen@legis.wisconsin.gov
(608) 266-5670 Capitol 319 South

Staff:
Eric Genrich eric.genrich@legis.wisconsin.gov
Jay Wadd Jay.Wadd@legis.wisconsin.gov
John Wagnitz John.Wagnitz@legis.wisconsin.gov
Jessica Lundquist jessica.lundquist@legis.wisconsin.gov

---

You'll notice who's missing.

I note it in passing.



hiho
Mpeterson

Glenn Grothman: finally recongnized as caucus leader in a minority view.

Whew. Sorry to have been away. We scheduled Midterm exams during election week this year so I've been grading when I wasn't phone banking.

But here we have a little insight into the great waltz of America -- what goes up, comes down.

Senator Grothman is once again closer to the truth revealed in polls, by the voters, and in constitutional law: he is once again explicitly the representative of a minority political view.

Whether this will give his symptoms the chance to ease off from the crystal meth narcosis of all that services-cutting kool-aid, we'll have to see. Presumably the Butler's Garter Snake has a few years left now, before extinction and, therefore, so do we humans. Presumably Glenn's minority and authoritarian commitments to being pro-birth, but not pro-life, will also have to shuffle away from the firelight and back into the darkness for a while. I'm hopeful that he'll come around to the kind of conservatism that represents the best in American history -- like Barry Goldwater or John Dean, say, rather than Joe McCarthy or George W(rongway) Bush.

But more on that later in the week. Next up, Glenn Grothman: wrong on conservatism.

hiho
Mpeterson

Will Glenn Grothman take Tom Reynold's spot in the Republican beastiary?

Hi folks,


The Journal-Sentinel threw its support to Jim Sullivan yesterday. It was an easy call. Jim's a great guy and will make a great Senator.

Still, it set me to thinking about Glenn's future.

With Tom Reynolds gone, who in the Senate will make legislative suggestions stranger than Glenn's? Who will stake out ethical and environmental positions stranger than Glenn's? Who will take the public's attention away from Glenn? Of whom will we chant "T'was brillig?"

While Reynold's departure means one less migraine for me, there is a downside -- it also means one fewer well spring of toxic and fallacious argumentation for use on my logic midterms.

I guess nothing is perfect.



hiho
Mpeterson

Glenn Grothman: wrong for putting $700 million at risk.

Hi folks,

Glenn just can't take yes for an answer if it conflicts with his ideologically tastes.


State committee eyes affirmative action

By Tom Sheehan | Tribune Capitol bureau

Committee chairman Sen. Glenn Grothman, R-West Bend, questioned state administration and university officials about hiring and admissions policies, which he said seem highly subjective. He asked UW System officials to provide a list of items that give applicants a chance to “jump up in the queue” in admissions.

UW System schools don’t assign “points” for race, although race is one factor among many considered in admissions, said Margaret Lewis, System associate vice president for state relations. Admission standards vary by campus, but academic performance is paramount in all cases, Lewis said.

The UW System is obligated by state and federal law to encourage diversity, and $700 million in federal grants could be at risk if federal standards are not met, said UW System General Counsel Patricia Brady, who testified before the committee.

Actually, I'm mostly amazed that Glenn used the word "queue."


Here's my take on diversity. I'm pretty sure I'm right about this too. Y'all will let me know.

1) Education is primarily about discovering the gaps in what you know (since the stuff you do know already is, well, already known to you).

2) You can't figure out by yourself what it is you don't know -- if you knew what it is you don't know, then you'd know what that is (you might want to reread that again, slowly) :^)

-- so you need other people to help you find those gaps in your education of which you remain unaware. In other words, to flesh out your own education, you have to get a handle on the "unknown unknowns." The Sec of Defense, when he made this quip about Iraq, was actually paraphrasing Socrates, so it's been the sort of thing my discipline has been thinking about for some time now. :^)

3) Since you cannot know by yourself what it is you don't know, you have to have people around you with different backgrounds to help you do that -- since people with the same backgrounds will tend, as a rule, to not-know the same stuff you don't know either.

and so 4) to be well educated, students need to be around a lot of other students from diverse backgrounds. This helps everyone locate the gaps in their own experience and knowledge base and, in this way, fill in those gaps and become... tada... better educated.


So it serves everyone if the UW system figures out a way to make sure it has a diverse student/faculty mix.


It seems ironic to me, just now rereading all that, to think that this little logical exercise might be too complicated for Glenn -- who is , remember, a LAWYER and a politician by trade.

Just musing.


hiho
Mpeterson

GG continues to embarrass Washington County.

Hey folks,

Here's the crux of Bill Berry's editorial in The Capital Times. Glenn is now bounded in a nutshell with bad dreams, inbound. Here's the nut.

Bill Berry: Politics trumps science on ground water rules

By Bill Berry, Oct. 3, 2006

But some in the Wisconsin Legislature have decided they're smarter that the professionals. The Legislature's Joint Committee on Administrative Rules killed the proposed health standard this month. Since the state's ground water law was passed in 1984, health standards have been set for 130 chemicals, but this marked the first time the Legislature has killed a regulation on an agricultural chemical sought by state health and environmental agencies.

At the forefront of efforts to kill the regulation was Sen. Glenn Grothman, R-West Bend, co-chairman of the rules committee. This is the same legislator who claims expertise in endangered species issues, fighting with the DNR to de-list the Butler garter snake from the state's list of threatened species so that development might proceed in the Milwaukee suburbs.

Grothman, an attorney, offered his own scientific appraisal of Lasso, saying he believes there is little danger from the chemical at the levels it is found in most wells. He added that few wells tested in the state actually exceeded the proposed standard of 20 parts per billion.

Going back to the old well of anti-DNR sentiment, Grothman took a whack at the department, saying among other things that "they just don't like people or what people do." With Lasso showing up in 28 percent of state private wells and 40 percent of the wells in southern agricultural areas, one is left to wonder whether it's Grothman who doesn't like people.

I never used to wonder about this back before Glenn beat Mary Panzer. He was approachable and conversant and hadn't had his wardrobe rearranged and colors done by some media consulting group. Since then it's been nothing but stranger every week.


Hmm.

hiho
Mpeterson

Glenn Grothman: would probably be wrong about the Ivory Coast too.

Hi folks,

Forwarded from one of the blog's correspondents. Here's why we don't let companies test their own chemicals for public safety -- their task is to make money, not to make things safe for people.

Here's a New York Times story about some toxic sludge dumped in the Ivory Coast.

You could say it's not quite in the same league as Monsanto and Glenn Grothman but now, as Bernard Shaw noted, we're just arguing over the price.

hiho
Mpeterson

Glenn Grothman: embarrassing Washington County in the national press.

Hi folks,


Well, he wasn't satisfied embarrassing us in front of the rest of the state, so Glenn is now embarrassing us in front of the whole country. We've been put on display in the Washington Post.

Specifically:

State Sen. Glenn Grothman wants to see the snake removed from the state's register of threatened species, because, he says, the snakes are plentiful and their protected status has cramped economic development and community projects such as a high school sports field and an aquatic complex in Milwaukee suburbs.

and

"The snake is everywhere. There are probably as many snakes as people," he said.

One simple question: "How do you know that, Glenn?"

Ironically, even the business sector agrees with the DNR and has been working through a plan to provide protection for this species:

Developer Craig Donze, chief operating officer of Simon Group Ltd., hopes the process will result in compromises short of ending the species's protected status.

"There's nothing to benefit either side with a delisting," he said, adding that other options being considered include tax credits and stipends to help owners of snake habitat.

Finally:

"This [delisting a species without scientific evidence] sets a slippery-slope precedent," said Natural Resources spokeswoman Erin Celello. "If they can delist the garter snake, they can delist other species. It's pretty clear this is politically motivated and not in the interest of good science."

It's not in the interest of good civics either.

We'll probably be on 60 Minutes next.



hiho
Mpeterson

Glenn Grothman: wrong on state law.

Hi folks,

Strange words coming out of the junior Senator in Madison this week.

Hearings were held about the Butler's garter snake and, as you can note from some of the comments we've had posted here, a lot of snake experts from around the state (and country now) want to know:

"What the heck is up with this Glenn Grothman guy?"

Apparently during the hearings Glenn was consistently sarcastic and snide about the use of "scientific evidence" to make decisions about wildlife management, and why experts mattered when it came to making decisions like whether a species is "threatened" or not -- which is, for starters, bad manners. And apparently he kept asserting that he didn't believe the snake was rare enough to be threatened.

Unfortunately the DNR cannot enforce the law based on Glenn's beliefs, and neither should they.

Strangest of all, he repeatedly asked the DNR representative "What gives you the authority to tell people what they can do on their land?"

This is strange, of course, because Glenn gives the DNR the authority to tell people what they can do on their land -- the Legislature does. In fact, technically, the DNR doesn't so much "have" the authority to enforce state and federal laws... it "is" the authority.

And the DNR has a choice: they can enforce our environmental laws based on science or based on what Glenn believes.

I'm still okay with the DNR using science, even when it inconveniences Glenn's friends.


[this is starting to make me dizzy. anybody else?]

hiho
Mpeterson