Wisconsin Right Now

Was Vice President Kamala Harris the most liberal U.S. Senator? Is it true? According to a recent ranking, yes. In an Aug. 12 interview, President Donald Trump said that he believes U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris is a "disaster. She is going to be a disaster I think for their party." The ranking is even more educational now, with President Joe Biden announcing on July 21 that he is dropping out of the presidential race and endorsing Harris to be the Democrat Party's nominee. Harris, Trump claimed, is "super liberal. I heard she is the most liberal person in Congress. More liberal than Bernie Sanders." Trump added, "I have to win the election because Kamala is a socialist." Of former vice president Joe Biden, who recently chose the California senator as his running mate, Trump said, "He’s been brought over. I guess he’s a socialist, I guess if you asked him what a socialist means, he wouldn’t give you an answer. He has no clue." Is Trump rig...

By: Rebecca Kleefisch We have a lot to be proud of. But while voters enjoy cookouts and fireworks this summer, we should not rest on the statewide ballot victories of April or even the local election wins. Activists need to work tirelessly and preach endlessly about the lessons learned in spring. I want to share what we learned because if we are not in a posture of constant improvement, the conservative movement will not improve win rates…and we must. As the president of the 1848 Project, which recruits, trains, and does continuing education for local candidates like school, county, and municipal board members, I was incredibly proud of our candidates’ win rate: nearly 70% declared victory in their April 2 elections. I want to reiterate: I am so proud of our win rate, our candidates, and the work ethic that got conservatives over the finish line in April. But the lessons we took away from spring were not about the wins but the preventable losses. We learned three big things, and ...

This is story 4 in WRN's 7-part series on the Waukesha County District Attorney's race, based on the recent DA debate sponsored by the Republican Party of Waukesha County. Waukesha County District Attorney candidate Mike Thurston's five donations to Democratic Milwaukee County DA John Chisholm sparked a heated exchange with his opponent, Lesli Boese, at the candidates' debate. At one point, Boese implied Thurston is a "RINO," although Thurston insisted he's since soured on Chisholm's leadership. "I didn’t know what a RINO was when I first started this. I do now know what a RINO is," Lesli Boese said, referring to the acronym for "Republican in Name Only." Thurston previously told Wisconsin Right Now that he did not recall making four of the five donations to Chisholm, who enraged conservatives with his later discredited John Doe probe into Republican Gov. Scott Walker's campaign finance network, as well as his 60% non...

This is story 3 in WRN's 7-part series on the Waukesha County District Attorney's race, based on the recent DA debate sponsored by the Republican Party of Waukesha County. Read parts 1 and 2 here and here. Waukesha County District Attorney candidate Mike Thurston said during a June 19 debate that, if elected, he would invite Democrats to train prosecutors in the DA's office on election integrity matters, a plan his opponent Lesli Boese called "silliness." Thurston said he would also invite Republican experts. "This wouldn’t just be a Republican thing," Thurston, a deputy DA in the office, said. "I'd invite Democrats too. They could come in. They could train us." He didn't name the experts who would get his invitations. The idea of bringing Democrats in to train Waukesha prosecutors on election integrity generated a sharp rebuttal from his opponent in the race, Deputy DA Lesli Boese . "This county needs a conservati...

This is story 2 in WRN's 7-part series on the Waukesha County District Attorney's race, based on the recent DA debate sponsored by the Republican Party of Waukesha County. Read story 1 here. What metric should be used to measure the prosecutorial performance of the two deputy district attorneys who are running for the top job? Candidates Lesli Boese and Mike Thurston disagreed sharply over that question during a DA debate. Thurston slammed the number of jury trials she's handled, saying he's handled far more in the past decade, and he said the drug unit she supervises has a "backlog" of cases waiting to be charged, whereas he doesn't. Thurston said Boese's drug unit has 103 uncharged cases, some dating back to 2019. She slammed his dismissal and amendment numbers. According to Boese, Thurston reduced 32% of his cases in a recent time frame from felonies to misdemeanors and dismissed 20% of them, numbers much higher than hers. The two candida...

This is story 2 in WRN's 7-part series on the Waukesha County District Attorney's race, based on the recent DA debate sponsored by the Republican Party of Waukesha County. What metric should be used to measure the prosecutorial performance of the two deputy district attorneys who are running for the top job? Candidates Lesli Boese and Mike Thurston disagreed sharply over that question during a DA debate. Thurston slammed the number of jury trials she's handled, saying he's handled far more in the past decade, and he said the drug unit she supervises has a "backlog" of cases waiting to be charged, whereas he doesn't. Thurston said Boese's drug unit has 103 uncharged cases, some dating back to 2019. She slammed his dismissal and amendment numbers. According to Boese, Thurston reduced 32% of his cases in a recent time frame from felonies to misdemeanors and dismissed 20% of them, numbers much higher than hers. The two candidates both handle key...

This is story 1 in WRN's 7-part series on the Waukesha County District Attorney's race, based on the recent DA debate sponsored by the Republican Party of Waukesha County. The two candidates for Waukesha County district attorney slammed the soft-on-crime philosophy under Democratic Gov. Tony Evers, saying it is imperiling safety in the county. Evers' weak approach to crimefighting and the damage it's doing to Waukesha County and the rest of the state was one area that Lesli Boese and Michael Thurston, both deputy DAs in the office, agree on. Both are career prosecutors who are running as Republicans in the Aug. 13 primary to replace retiring DA Susan Opper. They spoke at an often contentious June 19 debate. The debate, the first in the race and perhaps the only, was sponsored by the Republican Party of Waukesha County. Thurston slammed the lack of revocation for people on probation and parole who commit new crimes; Boese slammed Evers' early release stances...

Democrats love their cities. They know that people who move to cities are more likely to vote for liberals - no one knows why, but they do. I don’t know what makes people want to jam on top of each other and then vote for higher taxes, more regulation and rules, and for leaders who don’t give a hoot about them but profess that they do. Liberal progressives love capturing people in cities because they can force them to take buses or ride their bikes. It’s like a big urban social experiment for the left. They get to try out all their social engineering ideas on city dwellers. Republicans, on the other hand, love their rural areas, their smaller towns, and their suburbs, (count me as a small town guy), their wide open spaces, lower density, their cars and especially their pick up trucks, because open space and cars = freedom. Go where you want when you want. But Republicans recognize the need for cities too. They need cities for certain services, and we can love a city like Madison ...

The liberal partisans on the state Supreme Court are erasing former Justice David Prosser's name from the state Law Library, according to conservative Justice Rebecca Bradley, who labeled it a "petty and vindictive maneuver." She says they are replacing his name with the name of Lavinia Goodell, "Wisconsin's first female lawyer." Bradley exposed the move on X, writing, "In another petty and vindictive maneuver, the progressive majority of the Wisconsin Supreme Court flexes its political power to remove Justice David Prosser’s name from the State Law Library." She added, "In honor of Justice Prosser's decades of service to the people of Wisconsin in all three branches of government, the court named the State Law library after him after 18 years of service on the Wisconsin Supreme Court." Bradley continue, "As Wisconsin's first female lawyer, Lavinia Goodell was a trailblazer. The court could have honored her achieve...

Dan Bice left out a key sentence that changes the context. Stop the presses! The liberal media has a big scoop for you! Milwaukee Journal Sentinel gossip columnist Dan Bice has discovered that former Attorney General and current Supreme Court candidate Brad Schimel was caught speeding three years ago. The liberal media and Democratic operatives are desperate to cling to their partisan liberal Supreme Court majority so they can act as a super Legislature and undo common-sense reforms. So they've decided this is big news. How insane is the reaction? One commentator on X even compared Schimel's common-place speeding ticket (he was going 23 over on a state highway, the horrors!) to the infamous Kia Boyz , whose reckless driving and auto theft crime sprees were allowed to blossom through liberal policies on crime. Even more egregiously, Bice deceptively left out a key sentence in the story. He's done this kind of thing before: Not present the full quote so people c...

Tammy Baldwin praised the "accomplishments" of the Biden administration. Wisconsin Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin insists that the Joe Biden presidency is "one of the most successful administrations in generations." “In terms of legislative accomplishments, it is one of the most successful administrations in generations," Baldwin told the liberal blog Recombobulation Area in mid-June 2024. "And passing legislation that will have generational impact, that will unfold over the next decade, is really striking." She also said she "loved" the Milwaukee mayor and county executive and enjoys working with them on housing and other issues. She said she wanted people having mental health crises to get "services, not jail." Baldwin said her criticism of the Biden campaign is that "a lot of folks are benefitting from the accomplishments of this administration" but the campaign hasn't connected the dots. In part, she sai...

"The momentum is building" - Wisconsin GOP Chair Brian Schimming Former Wisconsin Governors Tommy Thompson and Scott Walker joined forces Tuesday in a big way, uniting behind former President Donald Trump with a level of enthusiasm that feels new. "Scott Walker and I will criss-cross the state, hand-in-hand," Thompson promised the crowd at the Trump rally at Racine's Festival Park, to roaring applause. When Trump took the stage, he lavished praise on both men; speaker after speaker indicated that, if Trump wins Wisconsin, he will likely win the race. "I love Milwaukee," Trump opened his speech, a reference to the misleading media and Democratic narrative on Trump's comments about the city. It was debunked by seven members of Congress, yet the media continued to obsess over that distorted narrative in their rally coverage. Trump quickly moved on from that, hitting Biden hard over the border crisis, inflation, his foreign policy failures,...

No response to the regrettable MPS debacle will be adequate if it does not include expanded educational choice for all families. Every child deserves an exit pass. Educational choice is the single policy with demonstrable results in the decades of MPS “reform” efforts. Scores of choice students have gone up while those of MPS students have declined. More than half of the city’s parents now use options enacted in the 1990s under Governor Tommy Thompson. The latest data available show that in the 2022-23 school year: • 5,766 Milwaukee students used the Open Enrollment program to enroll in a different public district than MPS; • 17,862 used public charter schools that operate outside the tentacles of the MPS bureaucracy; and • 28,916 used the pioneering Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP) to attend a private school. Data below helps explain the popularity of the private school option. Figures 1 and 2 compare the percentage of students in MPS and private choice schools t...

Seven members of Congress have debunked the misleading media claim that former President Donald Trump supposedly called Milwaukee a "horrible city" during a closed-door meeting with members of the U.S. House. We round up their comments below. “I was in the meeting. President Trump never disparaged Milwaukee. Just another Democrat hoax, "U.S. Rep. Jim Banks of Indiana wrote. https://twitter.com/Jim_Banks/status/1801287890141429907 The claim first originated from a reporter for a Washington D.C. area site called Punchbowl News and ricocheted throughout the media, sending Democrats rushing to their keyboards to post their sputtering outrage on social media. The Punchbowl News reporter claimed Trump said, "Milwaukee, where we are having our convention, is a horrible city." The only problem is that the claim is misleading at best, completely lacking context. Members of Congress who were actually in the closed-door media, which was not open to the press, sa...

My father, John E. Wall, age 91, passed away on Monday, October 30th, 2017. He was one hell of a guy; I ought to know, I knew him all my life. I know, I know, everyone says that about their own father, and I get that, but consider this. My father, the oldest of five children, raised 11 children and in spite of one child being deaf, another requiring heart surgery, another with psoriasis, another falling from a cliff and dying far too young, in spite of job changes, city changes and more, in spite of it all, he persevered. John came of age during World War II and rather than be forced into the infantry, he graduated high school early and joined the Navy at an age when today's high school kids’ biggest concern is their iPhones. He became a rear gunner on a Navy Hell-diver; his job was to keep the enemy away from the plane while his pilot dive-bombed the two of them straight down on targeted ships. He was given orders to ship out for the invasion of the Japanese home islands when ...

Vice President Kamala Harris has a fight on her hands if she wants to inherit the Democratic presidential mantle after President Joe Biden’s time is over, according to a new poll. The Politico/Morning Consult poll shows that voters have serious doubts about Harris’ electability. The poll found only 14% of voters said it was “very likely” Harris would win a general election for president if she became the Democratic nominee. Another 20% said it was “somewhat likely.” The poll is especially noteworthy given Biden's age. The incumbent president is 81 years old and appears increasingly in decline. A moment of confusion for Biden at a June 6 D-Day ceremony went viral last week, the latest in a string of similar incidents. At the same time, Biden remains competitive with former President Donald Trump, though several polls suggest Trump has a lead over the president. Biden's incidents have led some to speculate that Democrats could or should try to replace Biden at the De...

The dust has now settled after a period of time, when a former president was found “guilty” in a Kangaroo Court. Many patriotic Americans, myself included, had to take a deep breath or two to realize we have to go forward. This ruling means nothing. Yet, what did we, as Americans, learn? That our justice system has been corrupted and weaponized? You bet. Trump had an NDA (non-disclosure agreement) with a porn star. Stormy Daniels. Not “hush money.” And he paid her. And she took the money. That had absolutely nothing to do with any election interference or a threat to Democracy. The federal prosecutors who originally looked into this could find nothing wrong and did not charge Trump with any crime. Years later, enter a prosecutor from New York. A really, really blue state with said prosecutor who ran for office on “getting Trump.” The charges against Trump had to be created. They had to be convoluted and made viable to make an actual case since such had been dismissed a long t...