Retiring Guy's Digest

Thursday, September 7, 2023

GET ME REWRITE: Waukesha School District Board freakout over rainbows leads to federal lawsuit

Headline: Wisconsin Public Radio, 9/5/2023

In late March, the first-grade dual-language teacher blasted the district on social media after it excluded the song by Miley Cyrus and Dolly Parton. The lyrics were widely believed to focus on acceptance, but district officials said they found the song "could be deemed controversial."

She told news outlets, including Wisconsin Public Radio, that the Muppets' "Rainbow Connection" was initially banned but later accepted after pushback from parents and the Alliance for Education in Waukesha.

She also told WPR the district had not offered any specific reasons for the ban, but "the only common thread between those two songs was the word rainbow." [emphasis added]

GET ME REWRITE: These Looney Tunes Republicans in the Wisconsin legislature support a bill promoted by John Birch Society

Headline: The New American, 9/6/2023

Senate Bill 401 (S.B. 401) is introduced by Senators André Jacque (R-DePere) and Stephen Nass (R-Whitewater), and it is cosponsored by Representatives Elijah Behnke (R-Oconto), Ty Bodden (R-Hilbert), Janel Brandtjen (R-Menomonee Falls), David Murphy (R-Greenville), and Chuck Wichgers (R-Muskego).

The New American is a conservative and right-wing print magazine published twice a month and a digital news source published daily online by American Opinion Publishing Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of the John Birch Society.

GET ME REWRITE: Wisconsin GOP goes bonkers in efforts to save gerrymandered maps

Headline: Washington Post, 9/6/2023

The best way to summarize the imbalance at play in Wisconsin’s legislative elections is to consider the results of Assembly contests in 2016 and 2018.

Every two years, all 99 Assembly seats are put in front of voters. In 2016, Republicans won 64 of those seats, 65 percent of the total, while winning only 52 percent of the votes cast in Assembly races across the state. Democrats won 35 seats.

Two years later, in the national Democratic wave election, Democratic Assembly candidates won 53 percent of the votes cast — a six-point margin of victory. Perhaps you might assume, then, that they’d have landed somewhere around 64 seats, given how close that figure is to the Republican vote total in 2016. But the Democrats did not win 64 seats in the Assembly. They won only 36 — one more than when the Republican Assembly candidates beat Democrats by six points statewide in 2016. [emphasis added]

According to Merriam-Webster, the first known use of 'bonkers", as in not mentally sound, occurred in 1945.

Other coinages from the same year include: