Republican Ryan Owens dropped out of the race for attorney general Monday after facing criticism for deleting podcasts he hosted as a University of Wisconsin-Madison law professor.
Quoted: UW-Madison political science professor Barry Burden is the director of a non-partisan elections research center. He’s been following the election investigations closely.
“It’s really unclear what’s happening in each investigation because these things are mostly not being done in a public way,” Burden said.
Burden believes it’s unlikely that the probes will uncover anything problematic or new due to a lack of evidence to support claims of fraud.
“The motivation for what they’re doing is sort of hard to figure out,” he said. “It may be that they’re looking for reasons or justification to make some changes to state law. It might also be a way just to keep this issue on the front burner going into the next election cycle just to keep their voters energized.”
Quoted: Patrick Remington, a former epidemiologist for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s preventive medicine residency program, said leaning on the Wisconsin Emergency Response Plan is important to coordinate different entities but ideally, state officials would adopt an additional statewide plan that focuses on preventing and controlling the spread of the virus to combat the outbreak.
“That’s appropriate in the middle of an emergency, you need to have command and control and have top-down response. … It’s only part of the approach. You need to have a prevention and control plan that accompanies an emergency response plan,” Remington said.
A recent survey by the Wisconsin Center for Nursing and the School of Nursing at UW Madison shows an impending nursing shortage.
Anywhere from 10-20,000 nurses plan to retire in the next 10 years, and that could cause a crisis for the state. Right now many healthcare companies are finding it hard to staff nurses, so many are offering bonuses and high salaries to professionals from out of town.
Quoted: Heidi Johnson is the advising and training manager at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Office of Student Financial Aid and president of the statewide Wisconsin Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators. She told WPR the coronavirus pandemic and the year of online classes it brought to the state meant in-person meetings about FAFSA applications between students and high school counselors were halted.
As a result, Johnson said it wasn’t as easy for counselors to offer “friendly nudges” to encourage students to fill out the applications when mulling whether to attend college.
“So, I think certainly the timing of it, especially for that particular senior class, played a part,” said Johnson. “And just the fact that things stayed virtual, I think much longer than any of us planned for in the beginning.”
Quoted: Amaya Atucha, fruit crop specialist for UW-Madison, said she and other researchers are grateful to the cranberry growers that let them host projects on their marshes. She said worrying about the crops was a common issue that held back progress.
“When we want to study things related to an invasive insect or a disease in which you really have to let that disease take over your marsh or your production bed, you’re not going to do that in a grower’s commercial marsh, because the grower makes their living out of the fruit,” Atucha said.
Four episodes of a podcast hosted by Ryan Owens — some of them featuring critics of former President Donald Trump — have disappeared from the internet as the Republican candidate for attorney general ramps up his campaign.
Owens on Wednesday offered evolving accounts regarding the removal of the episodes of the University of Wisconsin-Madison podcast.
Democratic legislators are introducing a package of bills that would secure additional funding for the University of Wisconsin System and the state’s technical colleges, as well as make college more affordable through tuition freezes and need-based financial aid grants.
Quoted: “I was surprised at the level of the drop,” said Steve Deller, a UW-Madison professor of applied economics. “I would have thought that the second quarter of this year, we would have seen modest growth.”
Deller noted there was “modest growth” in terms of earnings from work, but that was offset by a drop off in “transfer receipts,” a category of income encompassing earnings from non-work sources.
Noted: For instance, lawmakers needed to make virtually no changes to the 60th Assembly District in Ozaukee County because it was underpopulated by just 10 people. Republican legislators instead decided to move about 17,600 people out of the district and about 18,000 people into the district. The shift moved 719 times as many people as what was needed, University of Wisconsin-Madison political scientist Ken Mayer noted in court testimony at the time.
Mayer described similar changes to districts on Milwaukee’s south side. One district was underpopulated by about 2,800 people, but Republican lawmakers moved about 23,000 people out of the district and about 25,600 into it.
Quoted: “Teachers do not deliberately set out to make students feel bad about themselves. The problem this bill seems to identify, that Wisconsin’s teachers intentionally or otherwise want to make students feel bad, is simply not real,” said Jeremy Stoddard, a University of Wisconsin-Madison curriculum and instruction professor, at an August hearing in the state Capitol.
“What I fear is that if it becomes law, it will have a chilling effect inhibiting teachers from teaching a full account of history,” he said then.
In a Wednesday informational hearing for the Senate Committee on Universities and Technical Colleges, legislators listened to UW System faculty and administrators share their perspectives on the issue. Frank King Jr., a UW-Platteville ethnic studies professor and executive director of diversity, equity and inclusion; Javier Tapia, a professor of educational policy and community studies at UW-Milwaukee; and John Zumbrunnen, UW-Madison’s vice provost for teaching and learning, gave remarks.
Video: Barry Burden, director of the UW-Madison Elections Research Center, responds to former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman’s statement about investigating the 2020 vote in the state.
Quoted: Purples and reds, however, are caused by anthocyanin, pigments that are more dependent on ideal fall weather. They serve a greater purpose than just looking pretty.
“Researchers here at UW-Madison back in 2003 discovered that these anthocyanins actually act as natural sunscreen for leaves,” said David Stevens, curator of the University of Wisconsin-Madison arboretum. “What they’re doing is protecting sugars that are still in the leaf from harmful effects of the sun once that chlorophyll is gone.”
Quoted: Jordan Ellenberg is a math professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. When it comes to what constitutes a fair map, Ellenberg said many Wisconsinites might be asking the wrong questions.
“The very word ‘fair,’ there’s some question of philosophy and some question of ethics and some question of law,” Ellenberg said. “There is not really a good answer to what is fair, so then you may say, ‘Well, what are we even doing?’ Like, why am I here talking about it? Because there is a good answer to what is unfair. That’s a different question.”
Quoted: Patrick Remington, a former epidemiologist for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s preventive medicine residency program, said the opposite is true.
“This has become a pandemic of the unvaccinated, worsened by people taking risks, such as gathering together indoors, without masks,” Remington said. “The vaccine has been very effective in preventing serious illness, and death. The fact that the delta variant is so much more contagious, means that we cannot rely on the vaccine alone, but need to reduce the risks of getting infected and infecting others.”
The prosecutor, Toney, is running against University of Wisconsin professor Ryan Owens in the Republican primary for attorney general in 2022. The winner will face Democratic Attorney General Josh Kaul, who on Thursday dismissed the GOP election investigation as chasing conspiracy theories.
Some University of Wisconsin schools are requiring students and staff to wear masks indoors. Some Republican lawmakers have pushed to sue to stop that requirement, but so far legislative leaders have not filed litigation.
During an informational hearing Wednesday on critical race theory by the Senate Committee on Universities and Technical Colleges, lawmakers spoke with members of the University of Wisconsin System, along with Chris Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and director of the conservative think tank’s critical race theory initiative, and Max Eden, research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and former senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
The reinstallations come as a task force works to erect a statue of Vel Phillips on the Capitol grounds. Phillips was the first Black woman to graduate from the University of Wisconsin Law School, the first female judge in Milwaukee County and the first Black judge in Wisconsin. She died in 2018.
Cardona will double down on Wisconsin today. First, he’s scheduled to visit Eau Claire for an elementary school tour and pep rally alongside local Superintendent Michael Johnson. He’ll then travel south for a stop at the flagship University of Wisconsin-Madison with school Chancellor Rebecca Blank.
The University of Wisconsin at Madison announced a commitment of $175 million for the School of Computer, Data and Information Sciences. The gift was $125 million from alumni John and Tashia Morgridge, of which $50 million was in the form of a one-to-one matching grant.
Quoted: “There’s nobody left with the necessary oversight,” said Barry Orton, professor emeritus of telecommunications at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Tommy Thompson, the longest-serving governor in Wisconsin history and current interim president of the University of Wisconsin System, had surgery Thursday following a water-skiing accident.
Quoted: Barry Burden, the director of the Election Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said Ayyadurai’s claim can’t be taken seriously.
“His statements about Massachusetts seem completely implausible,” Burden said. “These sort of artificial multipliers and things that he latches onto seem completely detached from reality.”
On Monday, the administration said about 70% of the more than 30,000 executive branch employees were at least partially vaccinated as of Friday. Executive branch employees don’t include the University of Wisconsin System or local school districts.
Then-Gov. Tommy Thompson, a Republican, picked Vos to serve as a student representative on the University of Wisconsin’s board of trustees. Vos was also college roommates with Reince Priebus, who later became chair of the Republican National Committee and Trump’s first White House chief of staff. Priebus didn’t respond to inquiries about Vos.
It’s the third rail of Republican politics in Wisconsin right now.
Do not praise anything that Democratic Gov. Tony Evers has done, especially his response to the coronavirus pandemic.
But there was Ryan Owens, a Republican candidate for attorney general, doing just that last year in a podcast produced by the University of Wisconsin-Madison political science department.
“We have to keep our eye on this,” Owens told the “1050 Bascom” podcast on April 6, 2020.
“The governor, to his credit, was ahead of the game when it came to the ‘safer at home’ order,” Owens said of the Evers administration’s March 2020 measure closing schools and nonessential businesses due to COVID-19. “We can quibble around the edges about the treatment of religion and things like that with it, but he was well ahead of a lot of states when he issued that order, to his credit.”
State Sen. Steve Nass has officially asked the Legislature’s Republican leaders to sue the University of Wisconsin System after system officials refused to submit their COVID-19 protocols to his committee for approval.
Quoted: National studies show people have been consuming more alcohol, especially women with young children, during the pandemic, said Julia Sherman, coordinator for the Wisconsin Alcohol Policy Project at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School. She said other research has found that people who increased alcohol consumption to cope with natural disasters, like Hurricane Katrina, didn’t slow their drinking afterward.
“And that is the big question,” said Sherman. “Will the drinking subside as this crisis fades? As we are able to get back to normal or the new normal? Will we all go back to the previous level of alcohol consumption? And based on this other reporting, it’s not as likely as we might hope.”
Quoted: Barry Burden, director of the Election Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said at Wednesday’s news conference that the partisan efforts would hurt the public perception of a well-run election.
“They are decreasing confidence in the election system, rather than increasing it, regardless of what they find,” Burden said. “The fact that questions and suspicions and allegations are being launched and there are multiple tracks of reviews happening simultaneously all coming in at different times with different conclusions is likely to undermine the trust that people have in the system.”
For months employers, politicians and economists have squared off over what role additional federal unemployment benefits had in contributing to a worker shortage in Wisconsin.
Now that an extra $300 a week in pandemic jobless benefits has ended, the question many have is whether — and when — people will return to the workforce.
“They will, but at a very small margin. Particularly for low wage jobs,” predicts economist Steven Deller from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Sen. Steve Nass officially asked the Legislature’s Republican leaders Tuesday to sue the University of Wisconsin System after system officials refused to submit their COVID-19 protocols to his committee for approval.
More jobs, but not a full recovery. Better wages, but fewer unions — and, as a consequence, weaker protections for workers. And gaping inequalities by race and ethnicity.
That’s the picture painted in the 2021 edition of the State of Working Wisconsin, an annual assessment that COWS, a University of Wisconsin research and policy center, has been producing for more than two decades.
COWS Associate Director Laura Dresser acknowledges a widespread urge to get “back to normal” under those conditions.
“But ‘normal’ for low-wage workers has long been unsustainable, leaving too many families struggling to get by,” she writes. “Adding jobs is important, but ensuring strong job quality and supports for low-wage workers is equally important.”
Republicans already appeared divided over how far to go in confronting the University of Wisconsin System — specifically former Governor Tommy Thompson — over setting its COVID-19 policies.
Sen. Steve Nass, co-chair of the Legislature’s rules committee, has threatened to sue system officials if they don’t submit their COVID-19 plans to the committee for approval by Thursday. System President Tommy Thompson has refused to capitulate, saying the system has the right to manage itself.
Sen. Robert Cowles issued a statement Thursday saying he wouldn’t support a legal challenge. He said tying the system’s hands isn’t in the best interests of local communities or businesses.
Noted: Researchers have warned the board that the state’s wolf population could be drawn down to unsustainable levels with another hunt. A recent study by University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers concluded that hunters and poachers might have killed a third of the wolf’s population since the animal’s delisting.
Noted: Identifying fish in Wisconsin is easier than ever thanks to an app that can be dowloaded to smartphones.
The app includes color photographs and information on 174 fish species. It was developed by the University of Wisconsin Center for Limnology, Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources and the University of Wisconsin Sea Grant Institute.
The embattled chairman of the Natural Resources Board sought and received counsel from aides to Republican state Senate leadership on his decision to not vacate his seat at the end of his six-year term in May, emails show — contrary to claims he hadn’t.
Frederick Prehn solicited advice from and shared information with several people since May, according to documents obtained by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, including Madison lobbyist Scott Meyer, U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany, and former University of Wisconsin Regent Gerald Whitburn.
The Assembly Majority Leader said Thursday he is not on board with suing the University of Wisconsin System over control of its COVID-19 policies, as one Republican senator has called on legislative leaders to do.
Wisconsin needs more Tommy Thompson and less Steve Nass.
Thompson, the former Republican governor, put his foot down this week when a meddlesome group from his own party tried to tell him how to run the University of Wisconsin System.
Alverno College announced Thursday that all students, staff and faculty must be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 by Nov. 1.
UW System interim President Tommy Thompson said Thursday he doesn’t plan to seek the job on a permanent basis, estimating about six months before he leaves the post.
The second-highest ranking member of the state Assembly said Thursday he does not support suing the University of Wisconsin System to control campuses’ COVID-19 policies, an idea pitched by a fellow Republican earlier this week to legislative leaders.
“We typically don’t have significant disease concerns with them,” said PJ Liesch, a University of Wisconsin entomologist. “These floodwater mosquitoes can be a nuisance, and they can lead to lots of bites and things like that, but in many cases they aren’t carrying diseases like West Nile virus.”
Quoted: “This is an appeal, really, to school administrators and other officials in schools, and most importantly to parents and anyone whose decision-making about masks in schools,” said Dr. Ellen Wald, a University of Wisconsin-Madison pediatrician who was one of nearly 500 doctors to sign the open letter from UW Health released Wednesday. “We think this is such an important intervention.”
Wald emphasized that masking everyone in schools has universal support among the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Wisconsin Department of Health Services and other health agencies.
University of Wisconsin System President Tommy Thompson pushed back Tuesday against Republican lawmakers who claim campuses need their permission to implement COVID-19 policies.
UW System interim President Tommy Thompson won’t be deterred by Republican lawmakers who say he needs their approval to enact COVID-19 regulations on campuses, he said Tuesday.
The University of Wisconsin System will not cooperate with legislative efforts to control campuses’ COVID-19 policies, interim System President Tommy Thompson said Tuesday in his strongest rebuke of Republicans to date.
Column by interim UW System president Thomnpson: The University of Wisconsin System owns a critical responsibility to open our classrooms this September to deliver the in-person education students deserve and parents expect. And we are planning to do just that. Unfortunately, some want us to ignore our unambiguous authority and duty under Wisconsin law to protect the “health, safety, and welfare of the university.”
University of Wisconsin System interim President Tommy Thompson says he will not comply with an order from Republican state lawmakers to submit COVID-19 safety restrictions and requirements for their approval. Thompson said he doesn’t think the state Legislature will sue over the matter but said if it goes to court he’s confident the UW will win.
Quoted: Steve Deller, an applied economics professor with University of Wisconsin-Madison, said for some businesses, not leasing office spaces has allowed them to bring down operating costs.
“I think three things are happening: a lot of businesses are embracing telecommuting as an alternative to maintaining office spaces; businesses are allowing greater flexibility for some of their workers to continue to telecommute; and finally, some workers are still uncomfortable returning to the office,” Deller said in an email.
But Deller said it’s “too soon to tell” whether shifts to remote work will continue in the long term.
Noted: One of the best examples demonstrating both the limitations and the potential of broadband for science is our collaboration with the Morgridge Institute for Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Each summer, Morgridge holds a series of Rural Summer Science Camps designed to expose students from isolated settings to some of the world’s top scientists who lead them in cool experiments on campus. They are exposed to exciting ideas and the joy of science. Most importantly, kids walk away from these camps with the confidence in knowing “I can compete at this level.”
All Wisconsin state employees within the executive branch agencies are now required to provide their COVID-19 vaccination status and documentation by Sept. 9 in addition to wearing masks indoors.
Quoted: “That’s a great thing in just the first month, I’m guessing that those numbers are going to improve,” said Timothy Smeeding, a University of Wisconsin-Madison economist and child tax credit expert. “The word’s getting out, so I expect it’ll even be better soon for people who really need it.”
The Urban Institute estimates 78 percent of eligible families will be receiving their tax credits by February, though Smeeding said he expects it will take even longer. He’s been working with several groups in Wisconsin to help connect harder-to-reach groups to the payments, especially immigrant families.
“All U.S.-born children who have Social Security numbers are eligible for the child tax payment, but (the families) are gun-shy because they fear public charge rules, they fear all sorts of things that took place under the last administration, and they need trusted people who they can work with,” he said.
The University of Wisconsin system’s Board of Regents fired a professor at the Stout campus last month for not wearing a mask in class last year in violation of campus and system policies, according to Madison.com.
This followed a demand by state-senate Republicans that the twenty-six campuses of the University of Wisconsin submit all covid safety protocols to legislators for approval. A few hours later, the University of Wisconsin at Madison announced indoor mask requirements to protect students and staff. “Today’s action feels like a political statement,” a university spokesman told reporters, explaining that university leaders “are doing what needs to be done now to safely open for in-person teaching this fall.” (The university system is led by Tommy Thompson, a pragmatic Republican former governor, who once served as the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services.)
Every University of Wisconsin System campus in the state has instituted mask requirements or expectations for individuals regardless of their vaccination status as the number of new coronavirus cases rises. The measures come amid an effort by Republican lawmakers to block COVID-19 restrictions at universities.
Quoted: University of Wisconsin-Madison economics professor Timothy Smeeding said the rise in wages for low-income workers means it’s a good time to reassess their jobs and find a better one.
“For those reasons, the job market is in favor of workers right now and turnover is good,” Smeeding said. “When people voluntarily leave jobs, economists think that’s good, because that meant they found something better.”
