This is beyond ghoul­ish.

A griev­ing Shawano County fam­ily is cop­ing with three dif­fi­cult losses in three days.

A WLUK-TV report says a 90-year-old hus­band and wife died sep­a­rately within about a day of each other. Then their home was burglarized.

The couple’s chil­dren say it was tough enough los­ing their par­ents, but it was espe­cially shock­ing to hear of the robbery.

Eldore and Malinda Mielke were mar­ried for 68 years. They both came down with the flu last week. Eldore died Mon­day and Malinda died Tuesday.

Their daugh­ter, Sue Ander­son, says her par­ents’ town of Mar­ion home was bur­glar­ized Wednes­day. She says the thieves took her par­ents’ wills and deeds, along with cash and coins.

Thieves who scour the obits for tar­gets are beyond human con­tempt in my opin­ion.  Here’s hop­ing the author­i­ties find these monsters.

It’s too early to say if it is good or bad, but one thing you can tell early on in the minor­ity lead­er­ship of Mil­wau­kee Demo­c­rat Chris Lar­son is that senior­ity means noth­ing to him.

That’s under­stand­able on one level, Lar­son him­self has only been a state sen­a­tor for two years before his ele­va­tion to lead­er­ship.  But on the other, it is utterly dis­re­spect­ful to many of the more sea­soned mem­bers of his cau­cus.  Already, he’s upset Lena Tay­lor for auc­tion­ing off her spot on the pow­er­ful Joint Finance Com­mit­tee (she was co-chair prior to the Democ­rats los­ing the cham­ber) to Robert Wirch.

Today, the other long-time mem­ber Democ­rats have had on the JFC — and along with Tay­lor, the other Demo­c­rat on the com­mit­tee from 2011 to mid-2012 — Bob Jauch, D-Poplar, had his pub­lic hissy fit. 

Sen. Bob Jauch (D-Poplar) said he didn’t attend Tuesday’s pri­vate meet­ing of Sen­ate Democ­rats because he found it dif­fi­cult to trust Sen­ate Minor­ity Leader Chris Lar­son (D-Milwaukee).

Also miss­ing Tuesday’s meet­ing were Sens. Jon Erpen­bach (D-Middleton) and Lena Tay­lor (D-Milwaukee). The three were the biggest losers in the lead­er­ship fight in Novem­ber.

Erpen­bach lost by one vote in the race for minor­ity leader. Once elected, Lar­son did not reap­point Jauch and Tay­lor to the pow­er­ful Joint Finance Com­mit­tee, instead replac­ing them with Sens. Bob Wirch (D-Kenosha) and Jen Shilling (D-La Crosse).

Erpenbach’s back­ers con­tend Wirch said before the vote he would back Erpen­bach but ulti­mately voted for Lar­son in hopes of secur­ing a seat on the finance com­mit­tee. Wirch has declined to say whom he backed.

“When (Lar­son) decided to barter one of the two Finance posi­tions for his own, I decided I’m going to serve my dis­trict — I don’t serve him,” Jauch said of his deci­sion to miss Tuesday’s meet­ing. “When you decide to put your­self and a title ahead of the best inter­ests of the cau­cus, I think it says more about him than me.”

“I’m still as strong a Demo­c­rat,” he added. “I don’t think I’ve changed. The Sen­ate has changed. I don’t like it.”

Again, as cau­cus leader, Lar­son is enti­tled to have whomever he wants on the Joint Finance Com­mit­tee, but he might be hurt­ing him­self in both the long and short-term.  By pretty much indi­cat­ing com­mit­tee assign­ments are up for sale to the high­est bid­der, Lar­son is show­ing that he can’t be trusted (I know, hard to imag­ine with him.) and that his word is only as good as the moment he gives it to you.

Trust is every­thing, espe­cially inside a cau­cus.  If Lar­son doesn’t have it now, what’s to guar­an­tee it in the future?

Sec­ondly, Jauch is up for re-election in 2014.  Such state­ments as “The Sen­ate has changed. I don’t like it.” tend to lead one to think he’s look­ing for the exits.  The 25th state Sen­ate dis­trict may be reli­ably Democratic-leaning, but he was barely re-elected in the 2010 wave; win­ning by only 51.3 per­cent of the vote.

If Democ­rats are hop­ing to have a chance of tak­ing back the state Sen­ate in 2014, they can’t risk play­ing defense in too many seats.  With the GOP pos­si­bly defend­ing the 1st, 5th, 17th, 23rd and 29th, Democ­rats can’t risk to be defend­ing any other seats besides the likely loss in the 21st.

Larson’s early intra-caucus games make it look like he’s on clear col­li­sion course ensur­ing he fails at tra­di­tional No. 1 job as minor­ity leader — re-elect and build upon party num­bers, so who am I to stop him?   It is his party after all, and if he wants to make sure it is filled with only Walker haters from Madi­son and Mil­wau­kee, that’s his choice.

Looks like AFSCME, the unions and the Demo­c­ra­tic estab­lish­ment have their guy, since Dane Co. Judge MaryAnn Sumi is a no-show.  They will be run­ning with left-wing crank pro­fes­sor (and good friend of most of the lib­eral blog­gers in this state) Ed Fal­lone as their can­di­date of choice in the upcom­ing state Supreme Court fight.

Past Fal­lone com­men­taries on var­i­ous rul­ings before the state Supreme Court have been main­stays on a num­ber of Wis­con­sin union web­sites since 2011.

This April’s state Supreme Court race will likely be the last chance the statewide left has for try­ing to derail Act 10 and much of the Walker agenda via lit­i­ga­tion.  Expect hell.

Here’s from Fallone’s cam­paign announce­ment he’s handed in 3,200 sig­na­tures to get on the bal­lot…in a press release writ­ten by for­mer Joanne Klop­pen­burg cam­paign man­ager and long-time Kath­leen Falk aide Melissa Mul­liken, who will be act­ing as cam­paign consultant.

Supreme Court Can­di­date Ed Fal­lone has sub­mit­ted about 3200 nom­i­na­tion sig­na­tures, about 1200 more than required, to the Gov­ern­ment Account­abil­ity Board (GAB). Vol­un­teers from around the State helped gather the sig­na­tures in only three weeks, after Fallone’s announce­ment of his can­di­dacy on Decem­ber 11.

“Peo­ple from across Wis­con­sin urged me to run for the Court and then stepped up to help gather the nec­es­sary sig­na­tures in a very short time and in very cold weather dur­ing a hol­i­day period,” Fal­lone noted. “I am grate­ful for their efforts, their trust and con­fi­dence. The Wis­con­sin Supreme Court is dys­func­tional and the only way to fix it is to change the per­son­al­i­ties on the bench. The peo­ple of Wis­con­sin expect — and deserve — judges who respect the impor­tance of an inde­pen­dent judi­ciary and who are impar­tial and fair. That is the kind of Jus­tice I will be.”

Fal­lone also announced he has hired Nathan Schwantes to man­age the cam­paign. Schwantes has expe­ri­ence as a cam­paign man­ager (Sen­a­tor Dave Hansen), served as a leg­isla­tive aide to Sen­a­tor Tim Car­pen­ter, and helped man­age grass­roots and get out the vote efforts dur­ing the 2012 Pres­i­den­tial elec­tion. Schwantes will begin work with the cam­paign on Tues­day, Jan­u­ary 8, 2013.

“Nate brings a wealth of expe­ri­ence to our cam­paign and has a great under­stand­ing of Wisconsin’s statewide polit­i­cal land­scape,” Fal­lone said. “His com­mit­ment to encour­ag­ing more peo­ple to vote and his abil­ity to get peo­ple involved in our cam­paign will be keys to our success.”

Nate Schwantes?  You mean this guy?

Accord­ing to his LinkedIn pro­file, that is his cur­rent job.

Just wanted to point this out the next time some­one on the other side wants to get clever by bring­ing up a job (RPW Exec­u­tive Direc­tor) Bran­don Scholtz hasn’t had in over twenty years.  Fallone’s get­ting mem­bers of his team cur­rently on the DPW payroll.

It is too early, but no word yet if any AFL-CIO employ­ees will be mak­ing appear­ances in his commercials.

Sig­na­tures are due on Jan­u­ary 2, 2013 at 5 PM at the offices of the Gov­ern­ment Account­abil­ity Board.

Wis­con­sin Supreme Court Jus­tice Pat Roggen­sack plans to sub­mit the required sig­na­tures to get her name on the bal­lot for re-election next year.

Roggen­sack planned to deliver 4,000 sig­na­tures on Fri­day to the state elec­tions board office. It takes at least 2,000 to get on the bal­lot for the April 2 election.

Two oth­ers have announced they intend to chal­lenge Roggen­sack but they have not yet turned in their nom­i­na­tion papers. The sig­na­tures are due Wednesday.

Chal­leng­ing Roggen­sack are Mar­quette Uni­ver­sity law pro­fes­sor Ed Fal­lone and Mil­wau­kee lemon law attor­ney Vince Megna.

Accord­ing to other media reports Megna has said he’s about 300 sig­na­tures shy of mak­ing the bal­lot with Fal­lone — who is now the assumed lib­eral hope with Dane Co. Judge Mary Ann Sumi likely not run­ning — not announc­ing how many sig­na­tures he’s gathered.

Next Wednes­day could be an inter­est­ing one for C-Level legal candidates.

What is most amaz­ing about this one, has to be a pretty sim­ple fact:

HIS OWN MOTHER TURNED HIM IN THIS TIME!

A well-known Capi­tol pro­tester was charged Wednes­day with receiv­ing stolen prop­erty for allegedly keep­ing a State Capi­tol police officer’s jacket, which he said he wore for friends as a joke.

The mother of Jeremy J. “Seg­way” Ryan, 24, of Madi­son, found the jacket in Octo­ber while she was clean­ing out Ryan’s apart­ment at 515 State St., accord­ing to a crim­i­nal com­plaint filed in Dane County Cir­cuit Court.

The jacket belonged to Offi­cer Tammy Torsten­son, who said she had taken off her jacket dur­ing protests at the Capi­tol and put it behind her work sta­tion but later found that it was miss­ing, accord­ing to the complaint.

The com­plaint does not state how the jacket came to be in Ryan’s possession.

As the story clearly states, Ryan’s mother was the one who found the jacket, so it leads one to believe that she’s the one who called the cops to inform them about it.  Since clearly, young Jeremy was more than happy to keep it as a “prize” and use it as a con­ver­sa­tion piece.

Boy…one won­ders the type of inter­view you’d get from “Seg­way Mom” about the type of child she’s unleashed upon the world. What does she think about his com­plete lack of respect for those in author­ity, total dis­re­gard for per­sonal respon­si­bil­ity, and what she thinks of her son’s actions and career choices in general.

Sadly, some­thing tells me you’d get an all-too com­mon, rather ordi­nary and often repeated “Only in Madi­son” story.

Since his office hasn’t said any­thing even remotely close to what this report is say­ing, you have to won­der how real it is.

Gov­er­nor Scott Walker says he’s con­sid­er­ing sev­eral options to keep tuitions afford­able in the Uni­ver­sity of Wis­con­sin System.

A Wis­con­sin Pub­lic Radio report says the options include freez­ing tuition, cap­ping the size of tuition hikes and rais­ing state aid.

The governor’s com­ments came last week when he spoke at a voucher school in Mil­wau­kee. A high school stu­dent asked about being able to afford col­lege, and Walker said one key is to make sure tuitions don’t keep get­ting raised.

Walker says he still wants the UW Sys­tem to grow and pro­vide a full breadth of pro­grams and courses. He says he’s work­ing with UW offi­cials on options.

A call for a tuition freeze is noth­ing new.  Heck, I was hear­ing calls for it when I was at col­lege myself — they never go through.

Frankly, you have to won­der how the math works out on a tuition freeze and if the state can even afford one.  For every dol­lar that is frozen from the amount stu­dents are pay­ing the UW-System, another dol­lar would have to be sub­si­dized from the state to cover for it.  Money, which is lim­ited, will have to come from the taxpayers.

Would I love to see an audit of the UW Sys­tem as well?  Def­i­nitely, mostly just to see if the place how bloated at the admin­is­tra­tive level the place truly is.  There’s no doubt the sys­tem is under­pay­ing its pro­fes­sors (I’m not mak­ing news here), but are they doing it at the expense of more and more bureau­crats who frankly just push papers around all day?

That’s a ques­tion I’d like to see answered first before we start freez­ing tuition.

Doesn’t get any more blunter than this.

And since it is from John Menard, he is going to be blunt.

The city of O’Fallon Mis­souri will lose poten­tial tax rev­enue after the home improve­ment store Menards pulled out of plans to estab­lish a loca­tion in the area. The com­pany is blam­ing the Obama admin­is­tra­tion for the project’s failure.

Menards, which is based in Wis­con­sin, is mov­ing into the St. Louis mar­ket with stores open­ing in Man­ches­ter, O’Fallon Illi­nois and St. Peters in the next six months.

A Menards spokesper­son says the com­pany no longer plans on adding a store in O’Fallon, Mis­souri because of the President’s eco­nomic policies.

“We are on sched­ule to open our new stores in O’Fallon, IL and St. Peters, MO this Spring, 2013.  For O’Fallon, MO, I’m very sorry, but we are a fam­ily owned busi­ness and with the Obama Admin­is­tra­tion scar­ing the dick­ens out of all small busi­nesses in the USA at present, we have decided not to risk expan­sion until things are more set­tled.  Thank you for your patience and understanding.”

Recall that back in the days of the Doyle Admin­is­tra­tion, Menards was a major critic of the Doyle-led DNR and at one-time even threat­ened to pull com­pletely out of Eau Claire, its his­tor­i­cal (and cor­po­rate) home­town.  So they don’t just huff and puff, they now look like they are going to start back it up.

So says the rich­est man in Wisconsin.

Good news, but is it a pyrrhic vic­tory for future state budgets?

Wis­con­sin health offi­cials say smok­ing by mid­dle and high school stu­dents has dropped to an all-time low.

The 2012 Wis­con­sin Youth Tobacco Sur­vey, released Mon­day, found that 13% of high school­ers say they smoke and 2.5% of mid­dle school­ers admit to smok­ing. The last study in 2010 showed nearly 18% of high schooner and nearly 4% of mid­dle schooler smoked.

The sur­vey is done by the Wis­con­sin Depart­ment of Health Ser­vices and the Wis­con­sin Depart­ment of Pub­lic Instruction.

The 2012 fig­ures con­trast sharply with 2000, when 33% of high school stu­dents and 12% of mid­dle school stu­dents said they smoked.

Admit­tedly, it’s a sur­vey, so you could have some lying going on.

The rea­son I bring up future state bud­gets, keep in mind, the for­mer Doyle bud­gets — espe­cially the 2009–2011 state bud­get — were built on mas­sive tax increases on tobacco sales.

If those are going to be lim­ited in the near-future, I got to admit, what­ever white paper the Leg­isla­tive Fis­cal Bureau is going to issue in the com­ing months on that rev­enue source will be an inter­est­ing one to read.

This is good news for the sta­tus quo at Oshkosh. Though, Icahn does have a point in his takeover bid; even­tu­ally Oshkosh will have to diver­sify its prod­uct line and move beyond mil­i­tary con­tracts.  Recent lay­off announce­ments are show­ing the cost of that cor­po­rate gov­er­nance in spades.

Icahn is known for pretty much doing hos­tile takeovers with the full intent of never help­ing a com­pany build.  He and his team have a his­tory of just going in, sell­ing off the prof­itable parts and then watch­ing the rest of the com­pany die on the vine.

Bil­lion­aire investor Carl Icahn is giv­ing up his bid to buy truck maker Oshkosh after less than 25 per­cent of the company’s shares were ten­dered before his offer expired.

OshKosh Corp. shares fell more than 5 per­cent in morn­ing trad­ing Tuesday.

Last week Icahn made it clear that he would walk away from his bid that val­ued the com­pany at about $3 bil­lion if the thresh­old wasn’t met. The ten­der offer expired on Mon­day, with about 22 per­cent of the shares tendered.

Icahn, who is known for buy­ing stakes in strug­gling com­pa­nies and then shak­ing them up with mixed results, had pre­vi­ously main­tained that Oshkosh needs new man­age­ment and a new strategy.

But he had said that he would “move on to other endeav­ors” if he did not get at least 25 per­cent of Oshkosh’s shares in the ten­der offer.

Icahn had said that the 25 per­cent level would show that he has enough sup­port for his plans and would jus­tify the exten­sion of the $32 .50 per share ten­der offer until the Wisconsin-based com­pany holds its upcom­ing annual share­hold­ers meeting.

Oshkosh Corp. is mak­ing money, but where it goes in future is in question.

As for Icahn, he’ll move onto some­thing else no doubt about it.  Ear­lier this year he bought a ton of Net­Flix stock, so who knows what his plans are for them?

Like Oshkosh Corp., they aren’t too pleased to see he has an increased inter­est in them.

Con­grats to them both.

Hunt­ing in Okla­homa over the Thanks­giv­ing hol­i­day, suc­cess came to the Wis­con­sin law­maker and his 10-year-old daugh­ter, Liza, mak­ing her first solo trip into the woods.

“Con­gress­man Ryan was grate­ful to spend time with his fam­ily over the Thanks­giv­ing hol­i­day. He was able to hunt with his daugh­ter Liza,” spokesman Kevin Seifert told Secrets.

“Both of them had suc­cess­ful and safe out­ings, each shoot­ing a buck,” he added.

Since their hunt just ended, more details of the size of the bucks weren’t available.

But Ryan, a ded­i­cated bowhunter, ear­lier said that his daugh­ter had been hunt­ing with him before but this was the first year she could legally hunt alone from her own stand. He added that she was prac­tic­ing with a Rem­ing­ton 700 .243 cal­iber he pre­vi­ously bought her. The .243 is one of the most pop­u­lar cal­ibers for deer hunt­ing because it is accu­rate at long dis­tances and recoils very little.

The Rem­ing­ton 700 .243 retails at around $350 to $450 depend­ing on the seller.   It’s a solid lit­tle starter rifle for a young hunter or mid­dle class hunter look­ing for a cheap, but good back-up gun to go hunt­ing with.