… and funded with your tax dollars!
Maybe you don’t do politics. You vote for the person, not the party — when you do vote. You can’t understand why you’re being taxed out of your home; why you don’t go on State Street after dark any more, why your kids report the day’s chaos in the classroom when they get home from school.
Here’s why: these guys on this flier. They’re not just elected to the city council or the school board. They’re taxpayer-paid, full-time employees with access to resources like the city’s website. They’re funded by tax-funded contracts and grants. They can call on employees, supporters, and hangers-on to flood the public comment section of government meetings, to picket non-compliant businesses, vandalize our public spaces, and f-bomb resisters’ homes via late-night bullhorns.
Mobilizing the cadres
Like Brenda Konkel’s Madison Street Medicine, one of the sponsors of the dog and pony show scheduled for 5 p.m. Thursday 09-17-26 at the Goodman community center, 214 Waubesa St. Funded by City of Madison taxpayers to the tune of $228,986, not counting federal grants. Housed in the Social Justice Center at 1202 Williamson Street, which the City of Madison for 15 months now has put on its public nuisance watch list.
One of MSM’s employees was cited getting into a fight there; another Madison Street Medicine employee peed on a neighbor’s property. Among Thursday’s star witnesses: Aeiramique Glass, the $149,000/year city employee who threatens to F-ing burn down this city during the illegal Corey Ruiz occupation on the same street.
Or Shadayra Kilfoy-Flores, the oft-arrested former head of the Police Civilian Oversight Board. Then again, one of the prerequisites for PCOB membership is a criminal record (see page 7). Republicans need not apply.
Community Forum facilitator Ananda Mirilli is a former MMSD school board member where Freedom Inc. bullied dissenters to defund school resource police officers. (Freedom Inc. is one of the sponsors of the so-called “Community Forum.” City of Madison gave them $149,000 this year — a portion of more than $5 million in municipal, state, and federal grants to Freedom Inc. since 2020.) Like Mirilli, Willy Street Ald. Davy Meyer was endorsed by Brenda Konkel’s Progressive Dane political party.
And what is their cause? Defunding the police by other means. If “177 changes to the Madison Police Department” isn’t exsanguination from a thousand paper cuts, they’ll conjure more. MMSD parent Ray Mendez encapsulates the phenomenon this-a-way:
“Madison has police, a monitor to watch the police, an oversight board to watch the monitor, a council to oversee the oversight, an ad hoc committee to review the council, a task force to study the committee, and a commission to recommend another committee. Connect the last one back to the police and we’ve invented a perpetual oversight machine.” — Ray Mendez
→ Speaking of throwing money at a problem, former mayor Paul Soglin blames “An out of control community service budget, with no accountability, no oversight, and no measurable successes in the largest area, reducing homelessness.”
Blaska’s Bottom Line: How do they do it? They’re better organized and better funded. With OUR money.
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