In defense of the tube that would have pumped thick, low-grade petroleum, known as the Keystone Pipeline, through the center of this country, those defending this project have cooked up a barrel of nonsense. They claim that President Joe Biden’s executive order closing down work on the Keystone would put tens of thousands out of work.

Let us all be reminded that the people who work on this pipeline, like all construction projects, are on a temporary job. Once it is finished, or in this case terminated, they move onto the next construction project.

Did we all freak out for the workers who completed Miller Park? Not if we didn’t want to be laughed at, because we all knew they had other projects waiting for them.

So, no, there are not tens of thousands of jobs at risk here. If anything, the green economy, if done right, will employ many orders of magnitude of people.

The 2021 Primary Election is only two weeks away. The most important election on that ballot statewide is the race for State Superintendent of Public Instruction. See a list of all the candidates and links to their statements, their websites, and their Facebook pages. The statements run long so for a very succinct three bullets about each, see the list at WEAU 13 News.

For lists of candidates for municipal, judicial, and school board elections, follow the links from our Races 2021 page. In many cases there will be no primary for the races because there are few races in which more than two candidates are competing. To request an absentee ballot and to see a sample ballot for your location, visit myVote.WI.gov.

Congressman Tom Tiffany, who represents the 7th Congressional District in Wisconsin, was first elected in a special election held in May 2020. He took the oath of office — swearing to defend and uphold the Constitution of the United States — soon thereafter. And he was re-elected on November 3, 2020. But he has since forfeited his right to be a member of the honorable House of Representatives and should not be allowed to return to Congress in January 2021.

When he signed an amicus brief supporting a Texas lawsuit that sought to overturn the November 2020 election and install Donald Trump in the presidency, he broke his oath of office.

As Speaker Pelosi wrote, "This lawsuit ... violates the principles enshrined in our American Democracy.  As the Pennsylvania Attorney General stated in a brief filed against this lawsuit, 'The Court should not abide this seditious abuse of the judicial process, and should send a clear and unmistakable signal that such abuse must never be replicated.'

"As Members of Congress, we take a solemn oath to support and defend the Constitution.  Republicans are subverting the Constitution by their reckless and fruitless assault on our democracy which threatens to seriously erode public trust in our most sacred democratic institutions... (Nancy Pelosi, Dec. 11, 2020).

Grassroots North Shore has opened a petition, to be sent to the House Speaker at the end of December, to voice our view that a person who publicly repudiates the votes and voters of his own Congressional District and the votes and voters of the state he serves does not belong in Congress. Please sign the petition.

Bill Holahan takes us through the most recent jobs report, for a Mythbusters segment on the economy. It's not good news for the country, or for Donald Trump. After explaining why, Bill goes into the remedy for this malaise, and that cure is electing Joe Biden. Bill has the numbers on that.

Click here to register for the event.

Click here to donate.

Click the Candidate forum.

Several years ago I was fortunate to sit in on a graduate Political Science class at UWM. The entire focus, even the title, of that class was Fascism. After a great deal of reading, research, and discussion, at the end of the semester we still did not have a definition of ‘fascism’. We asked the professor if he could give us a working definition. In essence, his answer was that fascism is “an apparatus that uses existing things to achieve its goals.”

For our purposes, apparatus can be thought of as a complex structure within an organization or system. Existing things can be institutions, organizations, societies, or people individually or as part of a group. A significant method by which these apparatuses insinuate themselves is frequently co-optation: defined by Merriam Webster as a taking over or appropriation of something for a new or different purpose. Robert Paxton, in his classic 1998 paper "The Five Stages of Fascism," suggests that fascism cannot be defined solely by its ideology, since fascism is a complex political phenomenon rather than a relatively coherent body of doctrine and that we should look to processes, not cosmetic features like flags and uniforms, to understand fascism.

The book, It Can’t Happen Here, released in the mid-thirties by renowned American author Sinclair Lewis, shows us how fascism can co-opt almost anything. In his story one of the first ‘things’ to fall was the Rotary, a service organization whose stated purpose is to bring together business and professional leaders in order to provide humanitarian service and to advance goodwill and peace around the world. Most people think of Rotary as fairly innocuous, but how they were co-opted was astonishing.