Wisconsin Clean Water Activists Stall Dangerous Proposed Development

Update: Door County Wisconsin resident cannot get Republican state legislators to offer defense of Public Trust Doctrine, (Freix, Door County Daily News).
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Citizen action in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin has halted a controversial waterfront development project in northeastern Wisconsin, (Welter, Green Bay Press Gazette, Door County Pulse).

The Friends of the Sturgeon Bay Public Waterfront group prevailed in Door County Circuit Court in February and March 2017 after a judge affirmed Wisconsin's Public Trust Doctrine protects specific public water and shoreland against private interests' for-profit use in Door County Wisconsin.

The rulings effectively stopped the Sawyer Hotel project, and now the developer of the proposal, Republican Party donor Robert Papke, is suing the city of Sturgeon Bay following the recent legal and political set-backs, (Welter, Green Bay Press Gazette, Door County Pulse).

In a new development, citizen clean-water activists say they fear legislative Republicans may be contemplating an extraordinary, end-around maneuver that would ultimately clear the way for the proposed hotel operation, in a corruption of an official state administrative deliberation, and a legal negotiation now in progress.

Some say Republicans may attempt to use the legislature to financially aid the Republican donor, Papke, and in the process potentially degrade the Public Trust Doctrine in Wisconsin that exists precisely to protect public waters against threats to the heath and accessibility of water, (Green Bay Press Gazette).

"Papke is desperate and pissed," said a local clean water activist, who is a member of a generations-long family in Door County, and fears financial and political retaliation by private developers and Republicans.

A 2017 Republican appointee to the Wisconsin Judicial Commission, the politically connected Papke is suspected of pushing Republican legislators to slip into the 2017-2019 budget language that would facilitate the operation of this specific controversial waterfront development, while at the same time pursuing legal action against Sturgeon Bay.

Papke claims he is pulling the project, (Door County Pulse).

UW-Milwaukee Study: One in Eight Wisconsin Black Men Incarcerated Between Ages, 18-64

The American Leviathan

Blacks, when you go to prison, your lives deserve to be a "living hell," said Tommy Thompson during his gubernatorial runs. Tommy used racially coded language that fit nicely into Wisconsin's conception of the most segregated urban area in America—Milwaukee. We got to stick it to those guys! We did. It worked well, and continues today.

Those blacks have no one to blame but themselves of course, the Republicans and Tea Partiers assure us.

Racism is pretended to be some long-gone ugliness even as the Republicans and Tea Parties directly appeal to racism every election.

Segregation, that's not racism.

Poverty, that's not racism.

The war on blacks' voting, that's not racism either.

And incarceration rates in the putative American society, the "leviathan unmatched in human history," pay no mind to race.

Wisconsin is Number One in black
incarceration rates.

Michael M. O'Hear has a piece up, Wisconsin #1 in Black Incarceration; How Did We Get Here?

Writes O'Hear:

A new report from the UWM Employment and Training Institute shows that Wisconsin leads the nation in incarcerating black males. Based on data from the 2010 U.S. census, Wisconsin incarcerates about one in every eight of its black men between the ages of 18 and 64. This includes individuals held in state and local correctional facilities. The Badger State’s black incarceration rate is, in fact, about one-third higher than that of the second-place state, Oklahoma, and nearly double the national average.

The UWM Employment and Training Institute (prepared by John Pawasarat and Lois M. Quinn) should be read in its entirety by the entire Wisconsin Republican legislative caucus.

I don't believe it will. The GOP are not big readers. They outsource that kind of thing.

From the study:

Among the most critical workforce issues facing Wisconsin are governmental policies and practices leading to mass incarceration of African Americans men and suspensions of driving privileges to low-income adults. [Note: See why the GOP wants only GOP-prescribed voter IDs as a constitutional qualification for voting in Wisconsin. The Wisconsin SC upholding the Voter ID law is likely too naked a corrupt power grab. We'll see.] The prison population in Wisconsin has more than tripled since 1990, fueled by increased government funding for drug enforcement (rather than treatment) and prison construction, three-strike rules, mandatory minimum sentence laws, truth-in-sentencing replacing judicial discretion in setting punishments, concentrated policing in minority communities, and state incarceration for minor probation and supervision violations. Particularly impacted were African American males, with the 2010 U.S. Census showing Wisconsin having the highest black male incarceration rate in the nation. In Milwaukee County over half of African American men in their 30s have served time in state prison.

Lueders’ Lets Justice Ziegler off the Hook

For my money, Bill Lueders and John Nichols are the two best political writers living in Wisconsin.

But I was stunned to read Lueders’ piece, “In Defense of Annette Ziegler,” in which Lueders calls Nichols’ criticism of Supreme Court Justice Annette Ziegler’s admitted conflicts of interests “way overblown,” “unfair,” and motivated by hostility toward Ziegler’s “ideology.”

Lueders’ acknowledges “… Ziegler was wrong to preside over cases in which she had an undisclosed personal connection to one of the parties. Her poor judgment was exacerbated by her initial refusal to admit she'd done anything wrong. …”

Wrong? A more apt description of Ziegler’s judicial misconduct is appalling, and contrary to settled law and ethical rules that specifically call for judges to avoid impropriety and the appearance of impropriety to promote public confidence in the impartiality of the judiciary.

Lueders knows better than most the violence that can be inflicted upon citizens by officials at all levels of law enforcement and the judiciary in civil and criminal litigation.

Judges have the power to interpret and apply the law, and the affirmative duty to maintain an ethical commitment to impartiality without which judicial rulings are an assault on the political body—that’s us.

Ziegler failed that duty, over and over, and this ought to disqualify her from sitting on the state’s highest bench, making judicial policy, whatever the recommended ruling of a judicial panel. [From the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign: Attorneys who violate rules governing their professional behavior and ethics – or who even fail to pay their annual State Bar dues on time – get stiffer punishment than the penalties being recommended for Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Annette Ziegler who had economic conflicts of interest in dozens of cases she handled as a circuit court judge, according to a Wisconsin Democracy Campaign review. ]

WMC

Lueders aims his harshest attack on Nichols’ condemnations centering on Ziegler’s hearing a case involving Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce (WMC), which any serious political observer will tell you, paid for the election of Ziegler to the Court.

Writes Lueders:

When Ziegler agreed to hear a case involving Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce (WMC), the big-business lobby group that spent more than $2 million to get her elected (more than her own campaign's record-breaking sum), The Cap Times was apoplectic.

… The objections being sounded by The Cap Times and others have everything to do with ideology. If a liberal justice committed the same indiscretions, WMC would be demanding her resignation and The Cap Times would be saying it was not a big deal.

Fine, let Lueders cite another judge who has heard (without notifying the litigants) over 50 cases in which her/his family has a financial stake, who lied about it repeatedly during the campaign for Supreme Court, and who after the election hears a case on which the lobbying entity that elected (or rather just paid $2 million in ads favorable to her election) her has a clear financial interest; and then let’s read the resulting criticism or cite the absence of it. Lueders cites no such judge.

Lueders concludes:

But it was the voters of Wisconsin, not WMC, who elected Annette Ziegler — and by a wide margin. If they were paying attention, they would have known about her conflicts and her “I'm with you” signals to conservatives. But they either didn't know or didn't care.

If we want a different system, we should fight for it. … In the meantime, we'll continue to get justices like Annette Ziegler. In other words, we'll get the justices we deserve.

No, the Supreme Court has the power right now to suspend or expel Ziegler whom we do not deserve.

And though Ziegler is certainly not alone in hearing cases in which litigants have contributed money in or advocated in the political system for a subsequently sitting judge, and public financing is certainly needed, the confluence of Ziegler’s misconduct, her lying about it, and her refusal to recuse herself from the WMC-related case, has diluted the confidence of the public in an impartial judiciary and ought to disqualify her from sitting on the state’s highest court.

If such an expulsion were to result in shining the light on other judicial misconduct and political corruption, so much the better.

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Vets for Common Sense Group Blasts Prosecution of Wisconsin Veteran

Wisconsin Public Radio runs a piece today on Wisconsin Navy veteran, Keith Roberts (1968-71), who ran afoul of the U.S. Dept. of Veterans Affairs (VA) and the U.S. Attorney’s office by filing a claim for disability benefits.

Now, Roberts who has been forced to fight in two courts simultaneously (the U.S. Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims (CAVC) and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh District) has picked up the support of Paul Sullivan and the national Veterans for Common Sense, among other veterans' groups.

Roberts has been serving a 48-month sentence since March on wire fraud for, in essence, not documenting his claim to the VA's satisfaction and upsetting the VA by accusing the agency of fraud.

Wisconsin Public Radio reports:

A national veterans organization has taken up the cause of Wisconsin Navy veteran convicted of wire fraud for falsely claiming veterans benefits for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder or P-T-S-D. The group Veterans for Common Sense says Keith Roberts conviction is part of larger strategy to discourage veterans from filing P-T-S-D claims.

Gil Halsted has the story.

The criminal case is scheduled to be heard before a three-member panel on Oct. 25, and is pending and briefed before the veterans' court, CAVC.

Legal questions and legal comments can be e-mailed to Robert Walsh at rpwalsh@sbcglobal.net.

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