 Hello and welcome to the Donahue Group. We're so glad you could join us. We're here for a half an hour of scintillating conversation and opinions about issues in the state of Wisconsin. We hope you'll find things that are interesting to listen to. Joining me, the Director of Assessment and Curriculum for Social Studies for the- I got a promotion for the last episode. The different jobs- Coordinator, I'm sorry. I'm not a coordinator. Whatever he is of Social Studies, and I'm going to give up now, a humble Social Studies teacher. Professor Tom Pineski, math professor at UW-Chabuigan. Former State Senator Cal Potter, all around Bon Vivant. I'm Mary Lynn Donahue, practicing law here. And we have a lot of interesting things to talk about at the state level, I think. It's been an interesting season. We're all into elections around here. The only election that's going on on April 3rd, please don't forget to vote, is that for Supreme Court Justice. Linda Clifford is squaring off in many ways against Judge Annette Ziegler. So I should say Attorney Clifford and Judge Ziegler are running a spirited race for the court. Justice John Wilcox is retiring. He's certainly a part of the conservative core, I think, of the Supreme Court. No matter who wins, there'll be a majority of women on the Supreme Court, which is very interesting. Considering that there are relatively few, really, really few women judges at all levels in the state of Wisconsin. So here you have the Supreme Court with four women of all different political stripes. I mean, how do you account for that? I just used my clever way of leading into the question of how do you account for that? Boy, am I not touching that one. I'm going to move right along. No, I mean, really, it might be an interesting analysis. An interesting analysis why the physician is attracting male. Are you dissatisfied with the male-dominated law firms? Yeah, or is it just the males aren't interested in the seat, or the campaigning has become so. Because they're gay enough that they're making all the bucks and the women aren't, too. First of all, I think that even though women make up half the graduating classes of most law schools, and even when I graduated from law school almost 30 years ago, that was the case, women practice at a much lower percentage just in the general practice of law. It's one of those professions that does not graciously let you work part-time very easily. And the type of law they practice is probably different. Yeah, I mean, it's an extremely demanding job. So if you want to have a family, putting those two things together really is quite a challenge. And so you have fewer women practicing. Sheboygan County, I counted it up because I had a party for women lawyers, who were actually up to 25 or 26 women lawyers in the county, which is an extraordinarily high number for the first 20 or so years. I was here as about four or five. And so that's been a bit of a growth. How many lawyers are there in the county? Well, through the bar, there are about 130 lawyers that are registered. But that's an all walks. That's in corporations, at the Kohler Company and various in-house counsel and retired lawyers. So I mean, private practice lawyers, I think there are maybe 50 or so. And of the 24 that I counted, certainly not all of them are in private practice. But we do digress a little bit, and it is interesting. And is the public willing to essentially hire women through elections to make important decisions? And I'm not sure the public is necessarily there. But every election is unique. Depends on who's running and what the issues are, and so forth. So I wasn't the primary, weren't there three individuals and one of them, a person who lost, wasn't he? Was he a he? It was a he, yeah. It was a he. It was a he. It was a he. It was a male. So it was a male, so. Horton, here's a he. Yeah, well, he wasn't even close. Wasn't even close, so yeah. Well, we segue into Clifford because she and this Mr. Summer were actually fairly close. And Annette Siegler was way out in front. Mr. Summer, I think, had some problems jumping into the race at a very, very late date. He's currently apparently under investigation by the lawyer's ethics board of professional responsibility. That's not good. That's not good. You know, I'm going to start making, yeah. No, I'm serious. You don't want that in a campaign? You really don't want that in a campaign. But that leads us to the sort of the defining issue of this campaign, the subject of a fairly scathing editorial I thought in the Sheboygan Press and other places about Judge Siegler ruling in about 40 cases, more or less, where her husband had what appears to be, I have not really investigated it, but a fairly clear financial interest. Judges aren't supposed to do that. And it's. The husband served on the board of directors. What's that? The husband served on the board of directors. Right. Of a bank. Of a bank. What role does the judge have in trying to perceive of being totally objective? And so while there's no criminal activity involved here, we're talking about a lapse, possibly, of good judgment. When does somebody say they ought not to be or at least go to the administrative judge in a district and say, here's my situation. Do you think I ought to maybe replace me on this case? But when you don't do anything, I think there's a judgmental thing here that's a valid campaign issue. Oh, I think it's extremely valid. You just need to distance yourself because while we expect politicians and legislators to take money, we really, really do not expect judges to rule in cases where their family may have a direct financial interest. At least to me, it's a transparently clear conflict of interest. And I understand some of the cases were sort of small claim default things where Judge Ziegler didn't really have any involvement in the case, but certainly not all of them. So I think it's interesting. I think it is a proverbial life preserver thrown to the Clifford campaign because I think prior to that. Clifford campaign dug it up. So they're looking for issues against Ned Ziegler. So I'm trying to find one. Actually, I think newspapers did. Wasn't that newspaper reporters who discovered that? And it's a. He came out of Madison, the Madison press, now, who tipped them off is another story. I mean, I don't know where exactly where they were. So Tom, you don't think it's a problem? I don't think it's a problem. I think it's much to do about nothing. Much to do about nothing. And they're trying to make it a big issue. And for some people, buying it is a big issue. And of course, Judge Ziegler always also has the problem of having accepted campaign contributions and above the limits. We'll talk a little bit about that with Governor Doyle and his continuing campaign finance blues. But I think it's interesting, and it has breathed some life into a campaign that I would have set after the primary was completely, completely dead in the water. I think Judge Ziegler thought she was just on her way to being anointed the new Supreme Court justice. And it'll be interesting just to see how it plays out. I think the editorial board, how they come out in the next week or so are going to be important because I don't think Clifford's going to get money anywhere near the money that Ziegler has. I mean, the ads are at least four to one, at least from watching the 10 o'clock news. It's those four ads for Ziegler to one for Clifford. And I think Clifford's trying to take the issue of conflict of interest and run with it. And Ziegler's saying, this is not illegal. I didn't gain anything financially myself. It's not a big deal, as Tom is point of view. And I think it's going to be a matter of two things then. Are the voters going to buy that? And then secondly, are the voters going to take a view that these ads are sufficient to its sort of anointer? I mean, there was a poll, and we mentioned it off the air, that I think 11% of the people in recent poll of people's perception of the Supreme Court was that she was already seated on the bench. Well, that shows the effect of the 32nd ad. If it's just the repetition of the name and the frequency of the ad, that's going to be a very strong determining factor. But if, again, people are listening to, say, editorial board commentary, or they have a sense that maybe she should have stepped down in some of these cases, maybe Clifford's got that hope. But right now, I mean, it looks that the money from WMC and others who are financing independent ads are really putting her name out there in big time. There's a good amount of money coming from outside the state, for the Ziegler campaign. I don't know exactly where this point were coming. Well, it's the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. It's running money through WMC, probably. I don't know if Linda's is almost all, or I don't know if she's receiving outside of Wisconsin funds, but she's certainly working hard. But you're right, it's basically boils down to name recognition, and you're absolutely right. I have talked to people who really do think she's on the bench already because she's called judge. That's why I wonder if they call her the same judge. When I point out that you call a member of the Supreme Court of Wisconsin to justice, and she's not on the court yet, and then there's other problem is that most people still don't have a sense, don't have any sense of what the Supreme Court really does in Wisconsin. They don't hold trials, so being a trial judge isn't necessarily that great an advantage over perhaps a lawyer who doesn't have that sort of gavel experience. And talking about being tough on crime, I don't know how that translates to the kind of cases the Wisconsin Court really, really hears. They don't sentence people. They very rarely, we don't have the death penalty, so they don't really have too many times to establish, you know, eighth amendment kinds of claims. Well this gets back to particularly for the judicial system where you really do want your judges not only to look independent, but to actually be independent of political influence through money is to look at public financing of Supreme Court races, if nothing else. For us to be spending millions and millions of dollars, I mean I think the estimate is going to be more than two million dollars on this race. WMC has already spent way in excess of 400,000 and independent ads for Ziegler. This is crazy. You know, is this the best money, the best judge that money can buy or justice that money can buy? Why not spend a little bit of public money at least for a Supreme Court race? I'm not even going to get near the Court of Appeals or trial court races or whatever. Well it's supposed to be non-partisan and when we start getting into these interest groups we start injecting I think an aspect of labor management and the Democrat-Republican that we ought not to have. I remember the discussion last time where we, who endorse who? Well who's endorsing one candidate, who's endorsing the other candidate and it's always party split. So it does become partisan even though it's not a partisan race. So it'll be interesting. I think there's, as close as these races seem, there still is a lot of time, as we mentioned in our other show, when the wheels come off in the last two weeks of the campaign and people are just, you know, I think of Calvin and Hobbes careening down the hill and there's sled and away you go and just because things are moving so quickly you really- A tree comes a little away. Don't you? Desperate times call for desperate measures. At a certain point in the campaign you realize you're going to have to do something that you probably would prefer not to do. I think it's pretty distasteful, I imagine. Yeah, but even the best managed campaign at the very end, things get a little raggedy. So, but it'll be interesting to see what happens. Well, we're going to go back to our, not only our current governor, but the person who lost the election, Mark Green has reached a deal with the elections board. As you remember, Mark was, Mr. Green was not allowed to use 467,000 more or less in his campaign because it had been imported from his congressional campaign. The elections board ruled he couldn't use the money. He has that now before the state supreme court. And recently he and his lawyers reached an agreement with the elections board which was approved on a seven to two vote that Mr. Green, apparently for dropping his lawsuit, will be able to use that $467,000 for three things. One, to contribute to other campaigns, so you can become everybody's most favorite loser to charities, which is typically when you close out a campaign account, you'll give your money to charity or to pay legal fees. Now, I know you guys are going to be mean to me on this, but I've always said that there's no better way to spend money than on attorney fees, you know, by and large and- Green's attorneys drew up the agreement. So, that's excellent. Is that a conflict of interest? Is that a conflict of interest? Is it or isn't it? No, that's good lawyering. And Green himself is a lawyer, so I'm sure he, I mean, no, are we clear that he can't be himself? I don't know. I don't know, but it, to me, it's interesting that- I'm sure through all of this, he's gotten a number of bills from his attorneys and he knows the meter's been running and it's not been very slow. Yeah, well, and it's actually been interesting. It would have been a very interesting decision from my perspective to have had from the court. Can you do this? Can you gather all this money from around the world for your congressional race and then decide to use it if you're gonna run for a gubernatorial spot or whatever it is that you wanna do? And I think it's an interesting legal question and presumably will now not be decided. Now, Governor Doyle, the fund never stops on the campaign wagon for Governor Doyle, who I personally have had respect for and, but the, tell me how to pronounce it. The Troha family? Troha? Troha is a very well-known family. I read about him and then Kenosha. Well, it appears that he and his family in one permutation or another have given over $200,000 to the Doyle campaign. Have we reached the point where Jim Doyle has gotten better at this than Tommy Thompson? I did not think that was possible. I was thinking it. I was thinking it. I said it came from a playbook of the previous governor and he's getting really good at it. You're a good judge for inflation. Yeah, maybe not, but he's getting there. He's getting there. I remember Harold Ickes being called on the carpet by a congressional campaign that was, or a committee that was investigating the Clinton fundraising machine and Mr. Ickes saying to the senator, don't you realize that we learned all of this from Ronald Reagan? But in any event. In some transportation legislation, favorable to his company and everything else. I mean, that was now congressional rather than state, but he's apparently a good player in the political system. And interestingly enough, has given, he's a equal opportunity giver. He's given to Republicans and Democrats and it's hard to know just where his loyalties lie, but. It's harder to say than Abramoff or something. Abramoff, yeah. Same thing. But it's interesting. You just wonder how much longer all of this can continue? I don't know. Well, also he's been a contributor to the various agencies or charitable organizations in Kenosha and they've got things. Do they have something named after him? I think. Oh yes, I'm sure they do. Yeah. And then we have. A well-known individual in the area. And then the Department of Transportation Secretary. Lose the record. Somehow his calendar disappears for two years, but it has now miraculously been found. It was lost, but now it's found and we can start singing amazing grace. Now we know where Rosemary Woods works. Where are we just cynical sitting around here? But I'm afraid our political system. Breeds it. It really does. It really does. It stretches credibility after a while. You keep hearing the same stories. Well, we talked about this before. When you raise the double digit millions to run a campaign. Exactly. You're gonna eventually have people who interact with the state frequently and give frequently and then you can always have to hold your nose and say, did this contact or that contact, you know, decision made, was it based on the finances or based on the merits? And I would say once you divest from the political contribution end of it, then you can start looking at the merits, but the other one is always gonna be there as a suspect. It just doesn't make much sense to me that we can't do something. Well, the alternative. I mean, I'm sorry, that's kind of a silly comment on my part. You're a Democratic governor and you've got at least a Democratic Senate. Where are they going? You know, they passed the original bill right away in the beginning of the legislature and where are we going now? Are they gonna cut their hands off though? I don't, I mean, the hand that's always out. I mean, I... Well, I think that's the, you know, the Democrats in Congress are facing the same thing where there was a lot of brouhaha about how we're gonna reform the system and they made a couple of cosmetic changes and made it a little tougher for an aide to get a steak dinner, I guess, but other than that, they're just rolling in the dough just like Tom Delay did. The unrepentant Tom Delay, I might add. So... So we're gonna go down. You might as well be unrepentant. Well, nobody has the courage to say, now that we have power, you know, perhaps we should do something constructive with that power. Now that we've got power, we're gonna play the same game as the other fellows and tell such a point that we get so disgusted we throw the other bums out to put the new bums in. So there's very few people who are willing to say we need to raise money from the public to finance campaigns. And so they're afraid to say we need $5 or $10 or $20, check off some type and a limit on spending to go forward. Nobody is willing to do that until we have an alternative funding mechanism where there's substantial money so it works. Nobody does anything but the state of school. The limit on spending is by the candidate, right? I mean, how can you put limits on all those political parties, not parties, but political action committees and interested groups from spending? I mean... We could, we could. They wanna spend. We have a Supreme Court that says that money equals free speech. And until that decision... Unless there's public finance. Right. Unless we, why not do a system where there is a real campaign for a short period of time. I know this is so pie in the sky, but just indulge my fantasy here. Where people are actually required to talk about the issues and where the public media needs to broadcast in depth discussions regarding the issues that face us. I know. You're getting all misty-eyed about it. Because after all, the channels belong to the public. They always belong to the public and they're supposed to be serving the public. There isn't any reason why you can't set up a system where you say you are gonna carry this rather than the 17th round of Seinfeld reruns, as much as I like watching. You know, a little, this is stretching it a little bit, but the presidential election used to have New Hampshire. It's now gonna be usurped by primaries in California, Florida, New York. We're not gonna have the discussion. They used to have political, good political discussions in the state of New Hampshire. Yep. Grip and grin. Yeah, and now they're gonna be swallowed up under media kinds of barrages for primaries. And on those silly 32nd TV ads that dumbed down the population, that obfuscate the real issues, and it is not morning in America. I'm reading Joe Klein's new book on political consultants and how it has changed since 1980, essentially, and the role of the political consultant is pretty interesting stuff. But let's go to free speech, just another permutation. I have on my internet a legislative service, bills that come up that are of interest, and we know that there's a public access television bill coming up that we'll discuss in our next show, but a few legislators have introduced, and I think this is fascinating, a bill to prohibit advertising for prescription drugs. And I have no idea, I'm sure this will have a very short life, but essentially, it prohibits advertising for prescription drugs with the view that the legislature finds that this is undermining healthcare, that it is increasing costs, that the advertising is inherently misleading. What do you think? Well, first of all, I'm surprised it's a state matter. I would think that this would be, with the television waves crossing state lines, this would be an FCC matter, and a national matter. So I'm surprised, jurisdictionally, that- Well, sometimes it bubbles up. I suppose. Do I need to see a lot of Viagra commercials on television? Frankly not. And a lot of other prescription drugs. I was kind of a lie. I always say, I guess maybe I'm a little bit naive in thinking that if I present them, as they say, I love that word present. The medical community says, when you present a set of symptoms, I love that. You presented at the emergency room with vomiting. I would think my doctor would at least have the expertise to tell me which drugs would be appropriate at which time. The Shaboy area school district, though, finds, at least it did when I was still in the school board, that the utilization patterns for prescription drugs were extremely high, in the, I shouldn't say extremely, but they were high in the school district as against other comparative systems. And- Well, that was, and- And I'm not saying that's a result of advertising, but- Yeah, I was just saying that's gotta do with that. It was essentially, it was a free good. And any economist will tell you a free good. People are gonna use a lot. At that particular point, under our, it's changed now, but it used to be that generic drugs were no charge to us. And prescription drugs, name drugs were $5, or some real nominal amount of money. Now those deductibles have gone up and there's not that incentive to just use any prescription just for the ease and convenience of it. All right, one of the rationales for the bill is what undermines the healthcare system? I don't, tell me how it does advertising for prescription drugs. Well, what advertising does is that it increases demand. I mean, that's why you advertise. Yeah. They wouldn't be advertising- Well, that's undermining the- Because it's very costly. Well, it also undermines the professionalism that needs to be injected by a doctor or a practitioner in determining what's appropriate for that particular person. I saw it on TV, this is what I want. People go into doctor's office and said, I saw on television this drug that cures my allergy problems. I want that drug as if they're picking off the shelf of a bar of soap or something. Whereas the disclaimer under said, you could die of 12 things if you take this drug. You know, maybe the doctor ought to be determined. Well, I'm gonna say the doctor, I'll say no. She'll just say, well, that's a- So why is the drug company spending all this money that you're paying for through higher drug costs to influence this person to go to their doctor to ask for this drug? Maybe this would be a way to reduce health insurance costs. It's interesting. I mean, it's clearly- You know, what's the interplay here? It leads to this. Sometimes I wonder if it's just the liability protection for some people. I mean, a doctor will give the drug or the patient asks for it. Therefore, they die from it. And they say, well, this person really wanted it. And I don't know. Other than giving a strong arm to your doctor, what the heck importance is this ad on television? Yeah, well, I think that the, particularly the sleeping aids and indigestion stuff, I think are heavily, heavily, heavily, heavily advertised. I don't watch a whole lot of TV, but I can see a lot in the, you know, half an hour a day I might spend on it. I can see a lunesta commercial, you know, three or four times. And nexium, the purple pill, is that indigestion? Prylizac. Yeah, and so you, whoops, you can see those, you know, over and over again. And so I just, I just happened to see this on my cell. And I, and of course, I think it's primarily, primarily relating to the Democrats. Indigestion and keeps you up at night. That's where we check and advise it. Well, maybe this will go the way of, you know, we used to have those smoking ads on TV and radio and they're now gone. Maybe this is another way. Exactly. It doesn't appear, yeah. So money isn't necessarily free speech, I guess, is I'm just tying this to in my very lunatical way or in my lunesta way to shortening campaigns for a political office and one thing. Okay, I think they suggest you watch this show if you need to fall asleep. That's kind of a stretch. That's not helpful. Well, and the last thing I wanted to talk about, and I did find this on, and it was just a tiny little article and I don't know if I can even find it, but I thought hurrah, hurrah. Tommy, Colin, I'll win the August 11th Iowa straw poll. Well, he's got a chance to Iowa, cause people know who he is. Tommy James and the Chandeliers. I mean, who, Tommy who? It's quintessential Tommy. He, if you don't have buzz, create your own buzz. He said this will put his name at the head of the list of GOP hopefuls. No. We're gearing for that. Thompson told reporters before making a fundraising pitch for his still undeclared campaign at a Madison law firm. It looks very good. In Iowa, he said, I'm doing more things better organizationally than any other candidate. It's tough leaving the limelight. Some do it gracefully and some not. Yep, that's all I'm saying about that. Nobody just wants to get back in the limelight for a short period of time, which is fine. Don't forget Tommy Thompson. And then just one other thing he says, and this is the thing you gotta love about Tommy. He said the firing of eight federal prosecutors probably should not have happened. And so I just thought, I thought that was interesting. And it'll be, so Tommy Thompson versus Mitt Romney. Rudy Giuliani. John McCain, maybe Fred Thompson. Yeah, and we get Fred back in it, but in any event. He isn't in any of those leagues, not even close. Yeah. Well, it'll be interesting to see how our brother could have won the governorship. How we go, but thanks for joining us and hope you enjoyed our conversation.