Progressive Thinking

GREEN BAY - If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. That seems to be the Republican motto when it comes to keeping those pesky Democratic voters from voting. A few years back, they invented the great “voter fraud” epidemic, with no real evidence that it ever existed, to justify a voter ID law in Wisconsin. Since many more poor people, espec ...

GREEN BAY – I have been listening to the “debate” coming out of our nation’s capitol all day on CNN and just can’t help but comment. Today, the Republicans in the House voted to hold the budget of the United States hostage so that they could make a statement about ObamaCare. They would fund the budget but not the implementation of the Affordable C ...

A few months ago Burke wasn't on the radar screen of possible Democratic candidates for governor in 2014, and now she seems to be the hand picked candidate pushed by the party establishment. But having family money and running with the country club set have not been known to buy you love in traditional Democratic circles. GREEN BAY - According t ...

GREEN BAY - Maybe, if you don’t look at it, it will go away? That seems to be the conservative stand on the Affordable Health Care Act, commonly known as ObamaCare. In Washington, the right wing in the House has voted 40 times to kill ObamaCare, while the pressing problems of the nation like job creation and immigration go unanswered. Governor Sc ...

GREEN BAY – The American Legal System boasts that it gives the accused the right to a trial before his or her peers. Unfortunately for justice, it sometimes does not guarantee the same right for the victim. Such was graphically the case in the trial of George Zimmerman last week in Florida for the murder of Trayvon Martin. In case you were vacati ...

MADISON - I hope your week is going well. Here are a couple of great articles that my colleague Iuscely Flores has written for us in the past few days. The first is essentially the text of a brief talk she gave in Milwaukee at a press conference on the need to make legislators retain all of their records: Wisconsin Democracy Campaign Supports ...

While women make up a growing majority in the workforce, their pay lags behind that of men doing the same jobs. Senator Smith discusses what we can do to move towards pay equity. MADISON - “WHEREAS, Equal Pay Day occurs each year on the day that symbolizes how far into the new year women must work full time to earn the same wages that their male ...

Senator Smith writes about how Wisconsin can use our projected $7 billion budget surplus to fix past shortfalls in state funding and improve services and infrastructure for all Wisconsinites. MADISON - Seven billion dollars! To anyone, that is a huge number, difficult to visualize or comprehend. But that’s the amount of Wisconsin’s projected su ...

MADISON - I hope your week’s gone well. I was pleased to see that the great pro-democracy law firm, Law Forward, is trying to get Michael Gableman’s law license revoked. I wrote about that here: Thank You, Law Forward, for Pursuing Gableman And I was also heartened by a piece of legislation to honor César Chavez. My colleague Iuscely Flores w ...

The week of February 27th to March 3rd is Public Schools Week, and Senator Smith discusses how successful public schools make for thriving families and communities. MADISON - School pride dies hard. Even now, many years after my high school graduation, when I hear of an Eau Claire North Husky that has been awarded for their success, I get a ...