It’s DEI or die! for campus free speech

Worse than the Joe McCarthy era!

What did that Stanford University administrator do when asked to restore order as law students disrupted an invited speaker? Instead of quelling the mob, she asked the speaker, a federal judge, “whether the juice was worth the squeeze”? I.E., do you really have to give your speech?

Is anyone surprised that this enabler of cancel culture was Stanford’s associate dean for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion?

Here at home, a systemwide survey of University of Wisconsin students found that 67.1% of liberal students want administrators to ban “harmful” views. One thing if conservatives were a numerical even match for those (il)liberal students. They’re not, by a long shot. Liberals outnumber conservative students almost four to one (57.4% to 15.8%) on the Madison campus.  

Not to mention Madison and Dane County!

Which is why we are thankful to Wisconsin Republicans for striking from Democrat(ic) Gov. Tony Evers’ proposed budget $3 million for a new, cabinet-level chief equity officer AND 18 more equity officers scattered throughout state government.

“The governor’s request comes at a time when diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs are under fire in higher education, business, and in government for fundamental unfairness and divisiveness and a failure to achieve their intended goals,” the Badger Institute notes.

The University of Wisconsin-Madison is riddled with DEI bureaucrats. Madison’s flagship campus has an entire administrative division devoted to the subject, headed by a deputy vice chancellor for Diversity and Inclusion (salary $131,852 as of 2021), supported by a “Gender and Sexuality Campus Center,” a multi-cultural student center, and an Office of Inclusion Education. And that’s only at the top. Every school, every college — education, engineering, business, nursing, pharmacy, letters & science, veterinary medicine, law, and agriculture — has its own DEI bureaucrats. Don’t forget the athletics department!

‘Progress requires embedding values of diversity, equity, and inclusion into the DNA of our community.’

— UW-Madison School of Business
"Whatever the intentions, the imposition of DEI bureaucracy upon the academy has too often come at the expense of academic freedom and freedom of expression. DEI administrators have been responsible for repeated campus rights abuses." — FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights & Expression).

Political commissars

According to FIRE, from 2014 to 2022 there were 877 attempts nationally to punish scholars “for expression that is, or in public contexts would be, protected by the First Amendment.” Of these, 60% resulted in actual sanctions — “more than during the McCarthy era.”

In practice, write two Heritage Foundation researchers in National Review, “DEI staff operate as a political commissariat, articulating and enforcing a political orthodoxy on campus. … Surveys of students (including minorities) which ask about how welcome they feel on campus tend to show worse results at universities with larger DEI staffs.”

Blaska’s Bottom Line: A university that renders Academy Award-winner Fredric March a non-person and exiles a 42-ton glacial boulder accused of racism is under the heel of the DEI thought police. Contra a typically meretricious Capital Times editorial that denies the problem, a student body that goes on a vandalism rampage when a conservative speaks on campus has been well schooled in totalitarianism.

Should legislators take the next step
and pare back the glut of UW DEI commissars?

Posted in cancel culture, Free speech, Uncategorized | 28 Comments

The black bear is in town!

After being spotted in Mt. Horeb

A black bear was spotted Friday 04-28-23 on the east side of Mt. Horeb, just north of the cemetery on WI Hwy 78. It was thought to be heading to Stewart County Park to the West. Maybe did. But at 3 p.m. today a large black bear was spotted on Madison’s SW side in a tree on Manor Green Drive, just a few houses north of Kroncke Drive. Just north of the Fitchburg city line. It may have been a juvenile but it was no cub!

Your correspondent jumped into the Werkes surveillance vehicle and, sure enough, there was the big fellow in a tree. Human owner of the premises said his neighbor had bees and chickens. Honey and drumsticks! Neighbor took the chickens inside. Three police cars responded to the scene, none with a tranquilizer dart. Others said a bear had been spotted at Home Depot on Verona Road earlier. That’s east of Meadowood, where the bear was found in the tree.

When we left, bear was still treed. No dogs barked. No sirens wailed. Poor guy may have been frightened just the same.

This is where bears are found. May have to revise the map. When we celebrated turkeys and foxes, we were being modest.

Blaska’s Bottom Line: Be extra careful driving tonight. Watch your pic-a-nic baskets for bear. Bring your chickens inside. Celebrate wildlife!

Are we healthier than the dooms sayers say?

Posted in Experimental Work Farm, Uncategorized | 8 Comments

The wages of Woke just got garnished

Has the P.C. fever broken?

We may be wrong. (Would not be the first time.) But something feels very different about the Shelia Stubbs controversy, contretemps, kerfuffle, whatever. We may very well be at an inflection point. The worm may be turning. A line being drawn in the quicksand. Whatever.

A recap for those who have been sleeping in a hollowed-out log like that black bear now prowling Mt. Horeb WI: Shelia Stubbs has been nominated to take over the Dane County Human Services Department at a salary of $181,500/year. She is also the first person with dark skin elected to the Wisconsin legislature from Madison WI. At first, she vowed to keep both jobs as well as, presumably, her day job as pastor of an End Times pentecostal church. 

That strikes reasonable people — even Dane County supervisors — as arrogant, selfish, and delusional. Rep. Stubbs retaliates by bad-mouthing the chairman of the Dane County Board, whom (one could assume) has some support among the 37 members or he would not hold the post.  

“No one else had to go through the scrutiny that I am going through: The difference is I’m black. God gave me that job. All I need God’s people to do is pray, fast and believe with me, and I believe we’ll take it by force.”

— Pastor Shelia Stubbs to her church congregation

Now THAT is what entitlement looks like! Shelia Stubbs floods a county board committee considering her appointment with supporters wearing T-shirts demanding — DEMANDING — her hiring. The nominee (allegedly) calls two black supervisors “Oreos” for questioning her credentials. Called another member an “extremist.” Ms.Stubbs’ own mother calls board chairman Patrick Miles a racist, a rat, and a weasel. Other supporters threatened supervisors via e-mail and telephone.

Not exactly a steady hand on the tiller!


“Supervisors keeping blacks out of government” ???

Conduct unbecoming job applicant

We submit this question to the peanut gallery: 

If you want to be hired for a $181,500/year job,
are you a little bit (let’s say it!) DEFERENTIAL
toward your prospective employers? 

Instead, Rep. Stubbs played the race card, as she is wont to do. Supervisors are asking questions of her they don’t ask other prospective administrators, she complains. The response, my dear lady, is that other nominees did not vote to send county money to her church, as has been alleged. Or have their wages garnished for non-payment of debt. (“Maybe she needs the money.) Other nominees did not presume to hold two outside jobs. Other nominees did not attack their prospective employers. Other nominees did not employ intimidation to get what they want or claim entitlement to that job.

We’re not talking Kevin McCarthy here

Result: the Health & Human Needs committee voted unanimously to Just Say No to Intimidation and race shaming! It is inconceivable the full county board would reverse that rejection. 

Remarkable because this is a county board of supervisors that begins every meeting reciting an oath to Wokeness. It populates an Equity, Recruitment, & Retention Committee, a Community Justice Council, a Racial Disparities Subcommittee, a Criminal Justice Reform Committee, an Office for Equity and Inclusion Board, an Equal Opportunity Commission. The H&HS Committee chair is Heidi Wegleitner — Progressive Dane. Defund the Jail.

For all that, County Executive Joe Parisi is doubling down on Ms. Stubbs. Says the lady is qualified. Despite her appalling inability to, as they say, read the room. Smooth over disagreement. And, frankly, disappear into the woodwork. Quick, name Gov. Tony Evers’ chief of staff. His secretary of labor. You can’t and you’re not supposed to. Good executives do not wire themselves to lightning rods. (We’ve heard an antipathy between supervisors and Parisi; this is its efflorescence.)

Blaska’s Bottom Line: Now it is time (past time) to make our point. Dane County supervisors — arguably the most liberal, progressive, and Woke in our glorious state — are having none of Ms. Stubbs’ racial bullying tactics. They will not be intimidated by her show of force or shamed by her guilt tripping. They are impervious to her claims of entitlement. Dane County does not owe Shelia Stubbs this job. Woke fever may have been broken!

Should we thank the combative applicant
for driving a spike into the heart of Wokeness?

Posted in Critical Race Theory / Identity politics, Dane County Board, Uncategorized | Tagged | 12 Comments

Joe Parisi: withdraw this nomination!

This nominee is an insult(eress)!

Takes considerable chutzpah to race bait a person with black skin. But when you’re as entitled as Shelia Stubbs, it’s another day at the office. 

The embattled nominee for a county job paying $181,500/year called County Supervisor April Kigeya and another black supervisor, in Kigeya’s telling, “an expression that refers to black people who cater to the interests of whites in power,” in the delicate words of the Wisconsin State Journal.

Or were they called “house N * * * ers”?

Called another minority-race member, Sup. Yogesh Chawla, an “extremist.” 

The nominee’s mother called the chairman of the county board “a racist, rat and weasel” at Thursday’s Health & Human Needs committee meeting. (Did the acorn fall far from the tree?)

Which is a strange way to win friends and influence the people who will ultimately decide whether you get the job running Dane County Human Services. Then again, insulting one’s way to office is becoming the norm, it seems.

Too Woke even for Dane County?

Regardless, the committee last night 04-27-23 voted unanimously to deny Stubbs the job but the Personnel & Finance Committee will have a kick at this cat before the county executive’s nomination goes before the full Dane County Board next month.

Unless Joe Parisi pulls her nomination, which is Blaska’s Bottom Line
Sup. Kigeya

Shelia Stubbs is a sitting member of the WI State Legislature, a Democrat representing south Madison; her other day job is pastor of a revivalist church. Only two days ago did she agree — apparently — to leave the State Assembly, after first vowing to do both jobs. Somehow. Running an agency with a $240 million budget and 794 employees is not a part-time job. We say “apparently” because her Assembly office put out a statement saying she’s not leaving. On Thursday, Stubbs blamed her Assembly office staff, which would confirm the chaos alleged at her office. 

There’s more rot in Denmark. Heidi Wegleitner is one of the most “progressive” county board members (she voted against improvements in the jail). She asks: Why no national search for applicants?

Then there’s the matter of fiscal responsibility. As we reported previously, the State of Wisconsin is garnishing Rep. Stubbs’ wages for welshing on a $35,000 debt. 

Now it is alleged that, while serving on the county board herself, Rep. Stubbs did not recuse herself when the county awarded money to the church she operates with her husband?

Should the district attorney make inquiries? 

Posted in Dane County Board, Uncategorized | Tagged | 16 Comments

Maybe she needs the money

Is Shelia Stubbs a triple dipper?

By any standard, running Dane County’s sprawling Human Services Department is a full-time+ job. It would tax Tommy Thompson, the most workaholic executive we’ve ever known. Shelia Stubbs, the county executive’s nominee for Human Services, would hold that and two other jobs, simultaneously. Is that humanly possible?

Dane County Human Services is a huge operation: its $240 million annual budget claims one-third of the total county government budget. Its 794 workers feed the elderly, accommodate the disabled, place foster children, house the poor, and succor the indigent. It’s a meat-grinder of a job and pays accordingly: $181,500 a year. (For frame of reference, the governor of Wisconsin is paid $152,756; County Executive Joe Parisi, who nominated Ms. Stubbs, $142,420.

Her profile fits our overly Woke political regime: female, racial minority, progressive, politically active. From 2008 to 2012, she chaired the county board committee overseeing the the Human Services Department she would now administer — if confirmed by the 37-member County Board of Supervisors.

The race card

Although she relinquished her county board seat last year, Shelia Stubbs remains a state legislator, to which she was first elected  in 2018. Annual salary: $57,408. She left the county board only last year, when the salary was $11,227.

We asked Rep. Stubbs (BTW: her first name is “She-LI-a,” not “SHEI-la”) if she would keep both jobs — State Assembly and county Human Services. She did not respond.

But the legislator told her congregation that she would, indeed, do the double dip. That’s according to the Wisconsin State Journal, which accessed a since-deleted video of that affirmation. On the video, she told church goers that county board members calling for her to resign the Assembly seat need to be “shooken up.”

“God gave me that job. All I need God’s people to do is pray, fast and believe with me, and I believe we’ll take it by force.” 

Ms. Stubbs played the race card:

“No one else had to go through the scrutiny that I am going through: The difference is I’m black.”

It is not the first time the Rev. Stubbs has played the race card. While campaigning five years ago in a high-crime area, a homeowner called police, as he was instructed to do, after noticing a car parked outside a suspected drug house with people waiting inside the vehicle. Those two people turned out to be her family members. Rep. Stubbs blamed racism.

We don’t know her salary as pastor of the End Times Ministries International church, which she co-founded with her husband, Godfrey, who is bishop of the church. But add that third salary to the mix. She’s a triple dipper.

Wages garnished

Like we said, Shelia Stubbs needs the paycheck. Creditors have been in court these past 11 years trying to get her and her husband to pay back $35,000 debt they incurred. Court records show her wages have been garnished since July 2021, when the Stubbs still owed $30,261. The case (#22-188614) was in court Tuesday 04-25-23 for a scheduling conference. 

Apparently, none of the 794 employees at DHS are qualified to take the reins. The position has been open since Shawn Tessman quit last July. Claimed the politicians reflexively took the side of organized labor over managers like her.

Blaska’s Bottom Line: Back in the day, county managers were career professionals, not political. In fairness, Shelia Stubbs has compiled an impressive list of public involvement in human services issues. She may well be qualified to take her new job. But she cannot help but shortchange our most at-risk county neighbors and/or her constituents in the 77th Assembly District, which covers the west side of Madison, from Camp Randall Stadium west  to Garner Park.

Her chronic financial difficulties are troubling. So are her greed, her threatening language, and her sense of racial grievance.

How troubled should YOUR county board member be?

Posted in Dane County Board, Uncategorized | Tagged | 18 Comments

We can blow this on-side kick if we try!

Is Brandon Bostick a free agent? 

What is that infernal shouting we’re hearing on the Stately Manor’s monaural, b&w Philco? Looks like some old guy shaking his fist at the clouds. Dammit! It’s Joe Biden! He’s following through on his threat to run for President! Does Medicaid even cover that?

Most Democrats don’t want him, public opinion polls report. Can you blame them? What’s Sleepy Joe going to do? Build Back Even Better Again, v. 2.0? Forgive not only college debt but subsidize Netflix subscriptions? At the end of his second term, when he’s older than Jonathan, that giant tortoise on Saint Helena island, does Biden address the 120th Congress via Holosphere from his cryonics tube? (“I’m here with the Splendid Splinter, Ted Williams. …”)

Republicans ought to own this guy like Aaron Rodgers owned the Chicago Bears, but the party of Lincoln appears to be falling in line behind a criminal defendant who is even more unlikeable. That’s not just your favorite RINO talking; it’s the Gallup poll (undoubtedly owned by George Soros). The FiveThirtyEight poll shows Sleepy Joe with a 5-point lead nationally and winning Wisconsin over #45. (“What do you mean, ‘Again’?” — Mike Gableman.)

So yeah, we could blow this yet. Which puts us in mind of the most interesting man in America, Aaron Rodgers, still blinking from his emergence from the bat cave. Brought titletown its last Super bowl victory after the 2010 season. Being the half-empty guy, this team owner rues the almost biannual defeats in the league championship games that denied us more Super Bowls. Kismet if the quarterback’s new team, the New York Jets, lose the AFC Championship game in some spectacularly stupid fashion. Like the Packers blew that NFC championship game to Seattle in 2015!

Blaska’s Bottom Line: We hear Brandon Bostwick is tanned, rested, and ready to sign — cheap. How about it, Jets! You signed him once! Give the old fumbler another chance!

Who would YOU put on the Republicans’
on-side kick team?

Posted in Sports, Uncategorized, Uncle Joe | 23 Comments