Senator Lyndsey Graham announced his opposition to requiring an ethics code for the Supreme Court, calling it an “unseemly effort to destroy the legitimacy” of the court. I guess Clarence Thomas accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars in gifts from an attorney and hiding his real estate dealings with said attorney didn’t do enough to destroy the court’s legitimacy, or maybe that was seemly.
The Wisconsin legislature proposed the “largest increase in aid for local governments in a generation”. What they forgot to mention is that they have spent that generation cutting shared revenue. From 1993 to 2021, state tax revenues increased 269%. During that same period, shared revenues (aid to local governments) decreased by 8%. These figures are in real dollars. Adjust for inflation, and 2021 shared revenue is half what it was in 1993.
The revenue sharing comes with strings. During the pandemic, the Republican-controlled state Supreme Court struck down the governor’s stay at home order and the legislature decreed that such decisions should be made locally. The current proposal gives money to cities but limits any future public health-related business closure ordered by a city to two weeks. It also tells cities how they can and can’t spend the shared revenue. In other words, local control only if it agrees with state Republicans.
Twitter has labeled NPR “state-affiliated media”. Should they label Fox News “foreign-controlled media”? He threatened to give NPR’s Twitter handle to someone else because they haven’t tweeted in a month. Meanwhile, he has made no such threat to djt, who hasn’t tweeted in more than two years, despite having his account reinstated 6 months ago.
And, finally, the WI Supreme Court overturned a prior ruling that a hospital can be ordered to provide Ivermectin to COVID patients. A lower court had ordered a hospital to provide the drug when the nephew of a patient obtained a prescription from a retired doctor who had never met the patient. What is remarkable about this news is that the decision wasn’t unanimous.
Half-fast Cycling Club 