Author: Wisconsin Examiner

President Joe Biden’s administration laid out ambitious additional goals in September to boost offshore wind power generation, one of the American renewable energy industry’s emerging wide open frontiers. The federal announcements come as coastal states across the country are increasingly setting offshore wind energy targets, seeking to capture not just clean energy but the potentially big economic benefits of their ports serving as hubs for the vessels, blade manufacturing, cables and other infrastructure needed to get turbines more than 850 feet tall installed miles out at sea. But amid news releases touting megawatt targets and jobs, there’s been less...

A bipartisan congressional team has gone to bat for a small Wisconsin manufacturer that won a federal lawsuit against a Chinese furniture giant accused of stealing its intellectual property. Senator Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) and U.S. Representatives Glenn Grothman (R-Glenbeulah) and Scott Fitzgerald (R-Juneau) joined in letters to three federal agencies urging action against Man Wah Holdings and its American subsidiary. Raffel Systems LLC in Germantown was awarded $106 million in damages in federal court in June after a jury found that Man Wah sold knockoffs of Raffel’s patented, lighted cup holder to be installed in furniture. In letters to...

Relationships, both formal and informal, between Wisconsin sheriff’s offices and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) cause immigrants to be deported for even minor offenses such as traffic violations while making immigrant communities more fearful of law enforcement in general, a report from the Wisconsin ACLU found. The report, released in late August, details the “jail-to-deportation pipeline” that has been established in the state and how even in counties that tout their liberal values and support for immigrants, relationships between ICE and sheriff’s departments flourish. The county that received the largest amount of money through the State Criminal Alien...

A federal judge on August 31 blocked a ruling that would have prevented Wisconsin voters with disabilities from getting assistance when casting a ballot. The ruling will allow voters with disabilities to have another person return their absentee ballots for them. In July, the conservative majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, in a decision that also banned the use of absentee ballot drop boxes, ruled that voters must mail their ballots themselves. Following the state court’s decision, voters with disabilities worried that they’d be forced to choose between breaking the law or disenfranchisement. The decision from U.S. District Judge...

Republican candidates who claim that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump have been nominated for governor in four critical swing states, raising concerns that if elected they could try to sway election results in 2024 and beyond. In Arizona, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, Republican primary voters elected a candidate who has denied the results of the 2020 election and believes that voter fraud influenced the results. GOP voters also nominated an election-denying candidate in Maryland, though he has less chance of winning in a blue state. Many more Republican gubernatorial candidates have questioned whether the 2020 election...

COVID-19 boosters shots are on track to become as frequent as the annual flu shot, though high-risk people may need more than one dose per year, Biden administration officials said on September 6. “For a large majority of Americans, we are moving to a point where a single annual COVID shot should provide a high degree of protection against serious illness all year,” White House COVID-19 Response Coordinator Ashish Jha said during a briefing. Anthony Fauci, chief medical adviser to President Joe Biden and director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of...