Wisconsin

I can see the WSOR trains go by a couple of times a day from my office window. There's a routine: Send a locomotive out to the west side to pick up the consist of hopper cars, take them out to the east to get filled with gravel or crushed stone, then take them out to the west, often with tanker cars added to the train. Once in a while, they take a train of full lumber cars west.

Today, I happened to look out and see something completely novel: C&NW steam locomotive #1385 on its flatbed, pulled by a WSOR diesel. The Mid-Continent Railway museum is finishing up a years-long restoration of #1385, and it's on its way back to North Freedom.

I am kind of embarrassed to admit how delighted I am to see it, and all of the love the volunteers have lavished on it. I remember seeing #1385 under full steam, pulling the circus train back in the day, so it holds a fond place in my childhood memories.

There's a homecoming celebration at the museum this Saturday, and I just had to share.

Source: https://www.yahoo.com/news/wisconsin-republican-deletes-post-appeared-002459499.html

https://www.wxow.com/news/wisconsin-politics/rep-van-orden-appears-to-celebrate-millions-losing-healthcare-in-since-deleted-x-post/article_d638ae8a-b6fc-42ec-9a97-38e0e3c9d1de.html

Hi Wisconsin, New Orleanian here.

This past May, Washington Post revealed the police in my city were secretly using the first of its kind facial recognition technology to track citizens in real time.

I'm posting here because I also learned that recently, Milwaukee police have been expressing interest in using facial recognition tech, despite protests from citizens.

New Orleans has been less than transparent about handling all of this, and NOPD has stopped using the tech since WaPo exposed they were violating a city ordinance. However, NOPD has now proposed an updated ordinance which would allow them to legally continue using the realtime tracking and facial recognition tech despite warnings from the ACLU that the ordinance will leave the city vulnerable to the federal government government.

"If the federal government wants to use the data from New Orleans facial recognition system to identify and deport undocumented persons in the city, they just have to get a federal warrant to come in and get that data,” Marlow said. “And they’re going to use it for that purpose, regardless of what the local law says.”

“What the New Orleans City Council needs to understand, and they need to understand it right now, is that if they set up a system of this level of power in their city, and they don’t have lockdown control in all instances over the technology and its data, they are placing every resident of New Orleans and every visitor of New Orleans at risk,” Marlow continued. “Not only [is New Orleans] creating the possibility that the federal government could come in and commandeer this equipment and its data to go after people in New Orleans, they’re inviting it.”

The City Council meeting regarding the proposed ordinance is schedule for this Thursday, June 26 at 10:00a.m. CDT.

There is also a Livestream link if you or anyone you know is interested in watching the meeting

Whether you choose to watch or not, I hope you will stay vigilant about what AI and surveillance policy your local law enforcement might be considering and how it relates to your own civil liberties. I find it very odd that in addition to the concerns over police use of facial recognition tech, New Orleans and Wisconsin also share a concerning link to the Peter Thiel owned company Palantir.

Former Wisconsin Congressman Mike Gallagher was named Palantir's defense business chief in August of 2024.

From ~2012-2018, the city of New Orleans secretly partnered with Palantir and allowed the company to test it's controversial predictive policing tech.

After this secret contract was exposed, predictive policing and eventually facial recognition technology were banned in New Orleans in 2020. In 2022, the mayor requested the ban be lifted and replaced with an ordinance that would allow some very concerning surveillance practices by law enforcement, and allow facial recognition in certain circumstances as long as it followed the procedure outlined in the ordinance.

This is the same ordinance that WaPo proved NOPD was violating in May of this year, and the same ordinance New Orleans city council will vote to amend this Thursday, June 26, 2025.

Although the city has allegedly not worked with Palantir since the official contract was dissolved in 2018, Project Nola, the private surveillance company NOPD was receiving the facial recognition and real time tracking information from, was established in 2015 by a former New Orleans police officer. During this time, Palantir was still using surveillance tools throughout the city to create and test their new predictive policing tech.

It's important to note that in addition to owning Palantir, Peter Thiel also happens to fund the facial recognition software company Clearview AI. Clearview has been providing facial recognition software to federal agencies such as ICE and multiple local law enforcement agencies around the country since ~2020.

A little background information, as I've recounted a few times on Lemmy: Back in the '90s, UW-Madison professor Joel Rogers co-founded an aspirational new political party—creatively named the New Party—that tried to revive fusion voting. They endorsed a Democratic candidate for the Minnesota House in 1994, and the Minnesota DFL objected. They took the case to the Supreme Court, which upheld the ban on fusion voting. The New Party lost momentum and fell apart soon afterwards. Progressive Dane, based in Madison, is the only remaining New Party affiliate.

It's not surprising to see the Wisconsin Republican Party objecting to the practice; it will be interesting to see what the Wisconsin Democratic Party thinks. (I recently learned from the Wikipedia page on fusion voting that the Republicans and Democrats used to run fusion candidates to defeat socialists in Milwaukee.)

I wish United Wisconsin all the luck.

The partial veto that the Wisconsin governor can do is ridiculous. But it was ridiculous back when Tommy Thompson was doing it, too. If Republicans can use it, so can Democrats.

In a sliver of good news for today, Michael Gableman faces consequences.

https://bsky.app/profile/satyaformadison.bsky.social/post/3lm3o2mnpxs2g

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/27797493

I guess that every election now will have a referendum to amend the state constitution for funsies. Let's add Chapter 1 of the statutes—Sovereignty and Jurisdiction of the State—since that seems pretty important. Maybe the state symbols? I mean, nothing's more patriotic than the American Robin. Let's get the lyrics to "On, Wisconsin!" in there, too. That, and the 2025 Green Bay Packers schedule definitely should be in the constitution, and we can add 2026 next year.

Now that it's an open ledger, what other random crap should we put into our foundational document?

Congratulations, Wisconsin!

Hey there, so I just saw that Wisconsin DMV has started warning residents about these phishing texts.

I'm just curious have you heard anything else about issues with stolen data or anything like that from the Wisconsin DMV?

Louisiana had an incident a few years ago where state government servers were hacked, and then a few years later pretty much every adult in LA had their data breached by a cyber attack at the Office of Motor Vehicles (OMV).

We never heard much else about it, but on the 20th of March the current governor reissued the state of emergency for the incident, gave the director of the governors office of Homeland security and emergency Preparedness (GOHSEP) the authority to handle it, then moved GOHSEP under the National guard and named a Louisiana guardsman interim director of GOHSEP. There's been continuing weirdness around it since, but not much detail.

Just wondering if there's any connection between the two. Seems like odd timing to be getting the message from your DMV.

https://wisconsindot.gov/Pages/about-wisdot/newsroom/news-rel/032825phishscam.aspx

https://louisianarecord.com/stories/670486434-murrill-warns-louisiana-residents-about-fake-toll-scam-texts

https://www.nola.com/news/politics/jeff-landry-restructure-gohsep-under-louisiana-national-guard-fiscal-responsibility/article_7e9e08f2-ee67-463c-a2b3-424f6165a087.html

https://www.fox8live.com/2025/03/21/gov-landry-declares-state-emergency-response-louisiana-omv-disruptions/

https://www.yahoo.com/news/louisiana-commissioner-office-motor-vehicles-231107729.html

https://www.shreveporttimes.com/story/news/2025/04/01/heres-the-latest-in-louisianas-office-of-motor-vehicles-outage-crisis/82754080007/

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/59733282

I saw someone on Mastodon mentioning Musk and the Wisconsin election and decided to do a quick dive into Wisconsin government to get things started.

Anyone from Wisconsin (or anywhere) that sees this please feel free to take the wheel and pick up where I leave off, or go somewhere else completely. The point of this is just to give you an example of how easy it is to find the corruption links in the massive SPN network.

So starting from scratch and knowing nothing about Wisconsin politics:

Wisconsin here's your SPN (and totally not the Heritage Foundation 😉) small government loving affiliate:

https://will-law.org/

I have to admit they seem to have their shit much more together than the majority of these places:

https://will-law.org/will-unveils-open-records-guide-to-promote-transparent-government/

Transparency is apparently very important to them, but not a whole lot of DOGE talk like most affiliates.

Oh wait, nvm, apparently Wisconsin's DOGE goes by GOAT, Government Operations, Accountability and Transparency, how cute goat 🐐

https://www.wpr.org/news/wisconsins-version-of-doge-called-goat-getting-started

https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/politics/2025/03/17/what-to-know-about-wisconsins-doge-inspired-goat-efficiency-committee/82337215007/

From these two articles I learned:

Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Robin Vos created GOAT.

The committee chair is Rep. Amanda Nedweski, R-Pleasant Prairie. The co-char is Rep. Shae Sortwell, R-Two Rivers.

Also on the committee: Rep. Tyler August, R-Walworth; Rep. Nate Gustafson, R-Fox Crossing; Rep. David Steffen, R-Howard; Rep. Dan Knodl, R-Germantown; Rep. Francesca Hong, D-Madison, and Rep. Angelina Cruz, D-Racine.

I started searching around for any of those member's names on WILLs website and on the first try, I found Amanda Nedweski mentioned in an article talking about how much she liked some education research WILL did in 2021.

The "research" these institutes do is usually how they justify the money SPN throws at them, so this is also usually a good place to find corruption if you're wondering where you should start.

(Side note:I included this information in another post, but this is a really great resource to get a quick overview of SPN shady nonsense. From the SPN source watch page: https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=State_Policy_Network

SPN groups operate as the policy, communications, and litigation arm of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), giving the cookie-cutter ALEC agenda a sheen of academic legitimacy and state-based support.

SPN groups increasingly peddle cookie-cutter "studies" to back the cookie-cutter ALEC agenda, spinning that agenda as indigenous to the state and giving it the aura of academic legitimacy.)

So anyway, back to Wisconsin, WILL's research director is William Flanders. Looking at his LinkedIn it looks like 4 weeks ago he helped present some data about why Medicaid expansion is wrong for the state. Not surprising, this is sounding very typical for an SPN affiliate.

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/wilawliberty_statebudget-medicaidexpansion-healthcarereform-activity-7300621776840007680-7Qvv

Presenting that data with Flanders was Robin Vos, creator of GOAT as well as Senate President Mary Felzkowski.

A quick search of Mary Felzkowski shows she's a member of Alec 🚨🚨🚨

Specifically, she's an Alec Health and Human Services Taskforce chair, so her involvement with this SPN affiliate peddling "research" about why Medicaid expansion is bad for everyone in Wisconsin checks out 100%

https://alec.org/person/mary-felzkowski/

If I were any Wisconsin citizen looking for low hanging fruit in order to expose some corruption and point out hypocrisy (and probably more direct ties to the Heritage Foundation and big corporations) in government officials promoting "accountability and transparency" I would say this is a great place to start. And that's coming from somebody who has never been to Wisconsin or heard of any of these people before making this post.

Imagine what Wisconsin citizens with insider knowledge can dig up in no time.