"A city cannot do 'good works' if it is financially challenged and if property taxes make housing unaffordable for homeowners and renters alike. Sadly, we are already there."

Writes Paul Soglin, the former mayor, in "Soglin: Madison faces ‘unprecedented fiscal crisis’/The former three-time mayor blames the mess on five years of bad decisions" (Isthmus).

Now, I'm thinking I have 2 kinds of readers: the ones who are saying why should I know or care about the Madison Public Market and...

... the ones who are saying yes, that's the thing that Althouse questioned that one time and Paul Soglin, the Mayor of Madison, instead of engaging respectfully, decided to attack her big time, so she was forced to resort to reason and mockery?

I'm reading "Madison Public Market all but scrapped, as officials make one last plea to alders for funding" (WKOW).

Here's the post I wrote on January 10, 2017:

"We took on this campaign to offer a different voice in Madison political life. To quit the blame game. To stop playing identity politics."

"I think we did that but the headline in this morning’s WI State Journal suggests we’ve got a ways to go: 'Winners secure all-female board.'... Fair enough, but the real story is it’s an all-status quo school board. The shocker is that education reformer Kaleem Caire did not make it despite running a textbook campaign.... The teachers union got their endorsements elected. No change for Progressives! Madison will continue to turn behavior issues into racial grievances, will continue to blame the man behind the tree instead of demanding individual accountability. [School superintendent] Jen Cheatham will keep blaming white privilege and shaming her hard-working teachers.... Madison even turned out Paul Soglin in favor of a mayor anointed by Progressive Dane.... Let’s face it: Madison went all Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Tuesday.... We offered real-life solutions rather than blaming nebulous, macro socio-economic conditions, Act 10 or various Koch brothers. Returning control of their classrooms to teachers was, Tuesday’s results show, a bridge too far.... I hope I showed the way. Praying that someone picks up the torch next year. I do believe it will have to get worse before it gets better. Me? I’ve got two motorcycles that need riding, bad. (Which is pretty much how I ride.)"

Writes David Blaska, who lost his bid for a seat on the Madison school board.

"Paul Soglin, Satia Rhodes-Conway advance to general election for Madison mayor."

The Wisconsin State Journal reports.

Mayor Paul Soglin and former Ald. Satya Rhodes-Conway advanced from an energetic, expensive six-way Madison mayoral primary Tuesday, setting up a battle between the city's longest-serving executive and a facilitator for a UW-Madison think tank who would be the first openly gay mayor in city history.

Nice photographs of the 2 winners at the link.

AND: In the school board primary: "Madison School Board: Blaska and Muldrow, Mertz and Mirilli advance to spring election."

[Ali] Muldrow, the co-executive director of GSAFE, held a commanding lead in a four-way primary for Seat 4 at nearly 56 percent of the vote with all precincts reporting, more than twice the number of votes for second-place finisher Blaska, a former Dane County Board member and conservative blogger....

"We thought we could survive simply because no one else is saying what I'm saying," Blaska, 69, said of the primary results.

For more of what Blaska has been saying, click on my "Blaska" tag.

"Can anyone topple Soglin?"

Are you voting in the mayoral primary in Madison tomorrow?

"In a startling reversal, Mayor Paul Soglin will now seek another four-year term, dramatically shaking up the city elections early next year."

The Capital Times reports on the Madison mayor, who said he was not running for reelection. That happened last July when Soglin was running for governor. But he lost badly in the primary. Soglin had created an opening that encouraged many new people to run for Mayor:

Since mid-summer, seven candidates have filed initial paperwork for the mayoral race: Ald. Maurice Cheeks; former Alds. Brenda Konkel, executive director of the tenant Resource Center, and Satya Rhodes-Conway, who works for the UW-Madison think tank Center on Wisconsin Strategy; Raj Shukla, executive director of the conservation organization River Alliance of Wisconsin; Toriana Pettaway, the city’s racial equity coordinator; Madison firefighter and former School Board member Michael Flores; and comedian Nick Hart.

Now, Soglin says "I made a miscalculation in July. I thought I would not be up for another campaign after the governor’s race. I am." As if it's was always only about his predicted energy level.

In July, Soglin said he believed that between six and eight consecutive years is an appropriate length of time for a mayor to serve, and underscored, “I can assure you there will not be a third sequel.”

“Eight years is a long time,” he said this week. “(But) the last two months, especially the feedback I’ve got in terms of handling the storm, has been very invigorating.”...

"We understand the purpose of education is not a career and a technical job, the purpose of an education is to teach young people how to think, which scares the hell out of Scott Walker."

Said Paul Soglin at the Democratic Party gubernatorial forum on Wednesday, quoted in "At Democratic forum Matt Flynn says Scott Walker will eat Tony Evers for lunch" (Wisconsin State Journal).

Here's the Isthmus report on the forum:

The mostly collegial conversation took a turn toward the end of the 90-minute forum, when Flynn took aim at Evers, criticizing him for supporting Walker’s most recent budget and calling him “Republican light.” Evers pushed back against the attack, calling Flynn’s characterization a “cheap shot” and pointing out that he praised the budget as “pro-kid” because Walker adopted 90 percent of the funding Evers had proposed. “I’ll never back off from that,” Evers said. “That is, frankly, an outrageous comment from somebody that I respect. We can win this race without this type of diatribe."

Flynn responded by suggesting that Evers couldn’t stand up to Walker. "If you ask an open question to a liar — to Scott Walker — he'll have you for lunch," Flynn said.

Tony Evers is the state school superintendent, and he's leading according to the latest Marquette poll. The primary is next Tuesday. It's a shame there are so many candidates. The forum was very hard to watch — technically amateurish to the point of absurdity. We watched and here's the comment I dashed off in my own comments section last night:

We watched the whole thing. Laughed a lot. At what??! They weren’t funny but we laughed anyway. Something about the mikes malfunctioning, Evers mumbling, that guy who seemed like Andy Kaufman wearing a yellow suit that turned green as the time wore on, Vinehout getting so gosh darn excited over everything and rocking back and forth, Flynn being so weirdly gruff, etc. It all seemed so rinky dink. At one point, a fedora floated by. No one took care of the technical side of this show. They were all seated, yet they stood up to talk and the camera had to tilt up and down woozily.

And you want to be my governor?

"A fedora floated by" literally refers to a man in a hat walking in front of the camera. Figuratively, it's a bit like an empty suit.

Floating Fedora from Natasha Kirke on Vimeo.

ADDED: Scott Walker won't eat Tony Evers for lunch because he's famous for eating the same thing for lunch every day, and it's not Tony Evers. See "This Governor Is Getting Mocked for Brown-Bagging Lunch Every Day" (Money):

Walker tweeted that for 26 long years in a row, he has eaten not one, but two ham-and-cheese sandwiches almost everyday for lunch. “Like millions of Americans, I bring my own lunch to work,” Walker wrote in the tweet.

Walker eating lunch is not a good metaphor for his opponents. It's long been part of his political rhetoric, and they're making me think of it.

"Madison Mayor Paul Soglin jostled his way Wednesday into the crowded Democratic primary for governor..."

"... prompting immediate debate with Republican Scott Walker about the liberal legacy of Wisconsin's capital and its longtime leader," the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports.

A Vietnam War protester who sometimes governed as mayor barefoot, Soglin traveled to meet Fidel Castro in Cuba and has dominated the capital city's politics for a generation....

With his gruff style and bushy mustache, the 72-year-old Soglin will be attempting to attract the kinds of supporters who gravitated to another lefty septuagenarian, former presidential candidate and U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders. But unlike Sanders, who went head-to-head with establishment candidate Hillary Clinton, Soglin faces a crowded field in which he is not the only liberal — or even the only liberal from Madison....

Meanwhile, the GOP has its candidate, the incumbent Scott Walker, who recently tweeted:

Look how far Democrats have drifted to the left when one of their leading candidates for Governor in Wisconsin is a mayor who gave brutal Communist dictator Fidel Castro the keys to the city! pic.twitter.com/6xw8HGiYjI

— Scott Walker (@ScottWalker) January 2, 2018

"There's a cemetery just a few blocks from where I live up here in the north where there is a section full of graves of Confederate soldiers."

"These are well-tended graves in part of a beautiful cemetery. I think these men suffered and died at the place we still call Camp Randall. It's where we play football now, but it was a miserable prison camp. But statues in the public square honoring the other side in a war? Why are we doing that? It's very strange!"

I wrote that in the comments section to a post I put up 2 days ago. I'd said "Why do we have monuments celebrating the losing side, the Americans who took up arms against America? That's rather crazy other than to express respect for the dead."

I really did not think the monument-topplers would go after the cemetery. 

But today I see that Madison Mayor Paul Soglin has ordered the removal of a stone with a plaque memorializing those dead men at the site of their graves:

Soglin said in a statement Thursday that he has directed staff to remove a plaque and a stone at the Confederate Rest section of the cemetery, adding "there should be no place in our country for bigotry, hatred or violence against those who seek to unite our communities and our country."...

A plaque at the Confederate Rest section of the public cemetery describes how the 140 soldiers ended buried in Wisconsin after surrendering in a battle and being taken to Camp Randall. It described them as "valiant Confederate soldiers" and "unsung heroes."

Here's an article from 2014 about that part of the cemetery:

The servicemen, most from Alabama’s 1st Infantry Regiment and others from Tennessee, Louisiana, Arkansas and Mississippi, died from their injuries or other ailments not long after arriving in Madison by train in April 1862. They were captured at Island No. 10 — a Confederate stronghold on the Mississippi River where Missouri, Kentucky and Tennessee meet — and held at Camp Randall, a Union army training facility that became a prisoner-of-war camp and military hospital.

Visitors from around the U.S. seeking their forebears have made pilgrimages to the small plot, and some have taken its plight to heart. Alice Whiting Waterman moved to Madison from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in 1866 to care for the graves. When she died in 1897, she was buried there with “her boys.”

I truly believed that Madisonians were proud of the respect they had shown for so long for those prisoners who died here.

It is awful to preempt public discussion about these graves, to choose go after them in a time of heightened passion. These are graves!

ADDED: Here is the full text of the statement Paul Soglin put up on the City of Madison website an hour ago:

What's "bold" about this plan? Why isn't it utterly normal?

I'm reading this in the local paper:

A bold short-term plan to remove Madison’s most notorious criminals from the streets was announced by Madison Police Chief Mike Koval Wednesday because they are holding the city “hostage to our fears.”

As the number of homicides and calls for “shots fired” reach record levels with nearly five months remaining this year, “there is an anxiety level in this city that is palpable,” Koval said.

At the top of the most-wanted list are the city’s “most egregious offenders and gang members,” all of whom are currently wanted for various crimes or have broken their terms of probation, Koval said.

You know you have egregious offenders and gang members who've committed crimes or broken the terms of their probation and it takes a bold new plan to go get them? How does that happen?

The targets at the top of the list also are all African-American. Koval said he received calls Thursday from some people who told him his plan has racist overtones, particularly since less than 8 percent of the Madison population is African-American....

ADDED: Notice the statement from the mayor (at the end of the article), calling criminals "terrorists":

“Despite all these efforts, we have young black men disproportionately killing other young black men and it has to stop,” Soglin said. “My greatest frustration used to be Madison businesses and Madison community leaders who gave lip service to creating equity but not performance. They have stepped up. Now my greatest frustrations are residents of our community who have knowledge of these murderers and terrorists and are not stepping forward.”

I assume that he's using the term "terrorists" to connect to the "see-something-say-something" ethic that we hear in connection with radical Islamic terrorism.

Who will challenge Governor Scott Walker in 2018?

Could it be Madison Mayor Paul Soglin?!

Madison Mayor Paul Soglin said Saturday that he’s considering seeking the Democratic nomination for governor in 2018....

It marked a reversal for Soglin, who said in December he had “no interest” in challenging Walker.... Soglin said the surprising appeal of U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, particularly in Wisconsin, is part of what changed his mind....

What's the difference between "safe space" and "safe place"?

5 days ago, we were talking about a resolution in the Madison City Council that would "Designate City Council offices as a safe space, where all residents may enter and be safe and protected."

Threatening to veto the resolution, Mayor Paul Soglin said:

"The consequences of declaring the offices a safe space can be disastrous.... We have made the point that we are a sanctuary city. We are committed to justice. The law is on our side. Let us avoid a futile gesture that that may make us feel good but that does not add to the sanctity of our position and only creates enormous risk."

Today, the news is that the resolution has been rewritten to say — instead of "safe space" — "safe place."

The concern was always that people would misinterpret what the city was offering. I have no idea why changing "space" to "place" matters. I mean, "safe space" is a cultural buzz phrase, some kind of jargon, so it may take on meaning in a weird way or radiate political heat and stir up extra controversy. But to my English-as-a-first-language ear, "space" and "place" — when referring to specified rooms in a particular building — mean the same thing. The question is more what "safe" means. 

ADDED: The City Council meeting on the resolution is going on right now. You can stream it here.

The Madison City Council considers a resolution that would "Designate City Council offices as a safe space, where all residents may enter and be safe and protected."

The Wisconsin State Journal reports. There are other parts to the resolution, which is a reaction to President Trump's immigration policies, but this "safe space" business is screwy.

Mayor Paul Soglin called it "reckless":

“The consequences of declaring the offices a safe space can be disastrous.... We have made the point that we are a sanctuary city. We are committed to justice. The law is on our side. Let us avoid a futile gesture that that may make us feel good but that does not add to the sanctity of our position and only creates enormous risk."

Sanctity?? "Sanctity" means holiness. Maybe Soglin sees it as the adjective that goes with "sanctuary." [ADDED: Another — better? — word is "sanctimoniousness."]

City attorney Michael May said language on the Trump executive orders and safe place is new, but the rest of the proposal is existing policy and practice, even though some of what’s existing isn’t written down. The safe space language is so vague that it’s essentially “meaningless,” May said, adding, “I see it as aspirational.”

Well, that's certainly reassuring. The city's lawyer says it's meaningless.

Nothing like meaninglessness to make you feel safe.

Mayors of "sanctuary cities" cry out as Trump threatens to withdraw federal funding if they don't abandon their independent ways.

The NYT reports on mayors from New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, New Haven, Syracuse, and Austin.*

“We’re going to defend all of our people regardless of where they come from, regardless of their immigration status,” Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York said at a news conference with other city officials.

In Chicago, Mayor Rahm Emanuel declared: “I want to be clear: We’re going to stay a sanctuary city. There is no stranger among us. Whether you’re from Poland or Pakistan, whether you’re from Ireland or India or Israel and whether you’re from Mexico or Moldova, where my grandfather came from, you are welcome in Chicago as you pursue the American dream.”

It's part of American federalism that state and local governments set their own agenda and perform their separate functions in their separate ways. Immigration is a matter that belongs to the federal government, but it can't force state and local government to do the work it wants done.

When cities are doing their own work, they don't have to load in tasks assigned by the federal government. They can choose to do so, and they can be tempted to make that choice by conditions imposed on federal spending, but those conditions need to be made clear at the point when the money is offered, so that they do have a choice.

That's the protection for federalism that the Supreme Court has built into its doctrine about the Congress's spending power. Congress is trusted to take account of the interests of state and local government when it attaches conditions to spending, which is why it has to make the conditions clear. You can't sneak up on the local government and trick it into a position where it later figures out the autonomy it has lost.

So I don't see how President Trump can go looking for spending to withdraw to bully local government officials into caving into his new policy agenda. That's not how American federalism in the present-day constitutional law doctrine works, and it's certainly nothing close to what someone who cares about the original understanding of federalism would think proper.

____________________

* Is Madison, Wisconsin a "sanctuary city"? No, but the mayor likes to say it is!

"On his blog, Mayor Paul Soglin takes on the UW's conservative blogger Ann Althouse for disparaging the city's proposed public market, mocking it as a liberal creation."

"Soglin extols the benefits the public market will begin to deliver and admonishes Althouse to stop portraying everything in Madison as crafted by liberals and reeking of socialism when, in fact, the plans are crafted by liberals reeking in capitalism."

I'm seeing that this morning in the local paper, The Capital Times, with no reporter's name attached to it. It's an embarrassing misreading of my post, but I don't know whether the misreading is by the Cap Times or the Mayor.

Here's the post of mine from a few days ago. It quotes a fundraising consultant who says she discovered that "people got more and more interested in the project" when she told them it was "about inclusiveness, and having a place for a variety of cultures and ethnicities to come together." My mockery was limited to expressing skepticism about whether people really were interested or merely "conscious of the need to look interested... when someone comes at you with talk of 'inclusiveness' and the 'com[ing] together' of 'cultures and ethnicities.'"

Beyond that, I confessed that "I've never been able to understand" the idea of the public market. That's not mocking the market, just admitting I don't get it. And I really don't get the idea that it's a tool for achieving "racial equity and social justice." I didn't say a word about capitalism and socialism. I'm just doing racial critique and suspicious that people are using racial propaganda to grease some project they want.

So let's take a look at Mayor Soglin's blog:

This weekend Ann Althouse mocked — she is good at that — the Madison Public Market....

What did she do? She used mockery...



Soglin says:

There is good reason why the analysis of the Public Market includes a focus on diversity, inclusiveness, and equity.

The bullet-point list that follows gives a visual impression of an argument, but I can't find it. The recent recession "was bad, and is still challenging, for low income families and individuals," these people need "entry-level jobs," entrepreneurship in food business can provide entry level jobs, and "low-income people of all colors and races" can engage in entrepreneurship. What is the argument? We're going to move toward racial equity with some new food service jobs and new potential to start a food-service business?

Speaking of entrepreneurship, you're not doing very well as an idea entrepreneur, Mayor Soglin. I said I didn't understand the idea. I'm open to listening to an argument, but you are not making it. You're just dropping a disjointed list out there as if the points add up. It's a tad underpants-gnomish.

Soglin proceeds to offer information about markets in other cities. The one in Seattle, he tells us, "is expensive and losing its charm as it is now a major tourist destination." Was it sold as helping the poor and minorities?

The one in Philadelphia is said to be good but related to the railway. Here, Soglin reminds us that — because of Scott Walker — we didn't get a train. So no train-related market for us. What that had to do with helping the poor and minorities, I don't know.

Next, Soglin refers to 3 markets in Minneapolis and York, Pennsylvania. The one in York supports vendors who are "almost all white, reflecting the population of the community." Wouldn't that support the prediction that a public market in 78.9% -white Madison would serve the interests of white people? What is the argument for the market as a racial-progress tool?

I don't think Soglin addresses my questions seriously at all. He dings me for mockery, but my mockery is much more serious than his haphazard dumping of factoids with no substance linking them up into a reasonable argument.

Really, he fails to see that I went easy on him by keeping things light with questions, confessions of inability to understand, and invitations to engage. He did not engage.

And check out his last paragraph:

If Althouse can look beyond her own exclusive world, one reeking in privilege, perhaps she will escape the shackles of her rigid assumption that everything in Madison is crafted by liberals, reeking in socialism. At times these plans are crafted by liberals reeking in capitalism.

He said "reeking" three times. I guess he thinks smelliness is funny. Maybe he's into the metaphor that ideology is odor.

Let's take a closer sniff.

The first "reeking" is my exclusive, privileged world. What world is that? Madison, Wisconsin? The University of Wisconsin? The law school?

Next, I'm accused of having a "rigid assumption that everything in Madison is crafted by liberals, reeking in socialism." That doesn't connect to anything in my post. The rigidity must be in his head. He who smelt it dealt it.

He's afraid, I suspect, that he'll be accused of socialism. But I was expressing skepticism about race-based propaganda for things that don't seem to have anything to do with race.

I didn't hit you over the head with this, Mayor Soglin, but your project seems to be offering something white middle-class people like. And one of the things these people like is the feeling that they are not greedily grasping at something they want, but helping the poor and minorities.

And speaking of liberal self-love, why do you think you smell so good when you're trying to do capitalism? Do you think socialism stinks or do you think you stink of socialism and need to douse yourself with capitalism to get something done? I never talked about capitalism and socialism. I talked about race propaganda, who really benefits, and will this thing really work?

Take a metaphorical shower and come back when you're ready to talk substance, sound argument, and reality.

ADDED: Meade points out that Soglin put a link on "reeking in privilege" in that last paragraph, where he's saying I'm in an "exclusive, privileged world." It goes to a post of mine from yesterday, "Did you watch the Golden Globes last night and hear what the entertainment industry people had to say about Trump?" That's a post making fun of the Hollywood elite that partied with Obama on Saturday and celebrated themselves with awards on Sunday. I was saying we weren't watching the Globes but the Packers game. Well, it is a privilege to live in Wisconsin and root for the Packers, but I don't think that's what he could have meant. I do see that my post used the phrase "reeking privilege." I said:

But I find celebrity talk about presidential politics so compulsively avoidable these days. The celebrities all backed Hillary Clinton. They — in their reeking privilege — seemed to have had their hearts set on 8 more years of glamming it up in the White House.

Does that show me in an "exclusive world"? It's a world anyone can enter. All you've got to do is feel sick of celebrities talking about presidential politics. Come on in! Everyone's welcome. Want to watch the Packers game?

My city's mayor, Paul Soglin, has a blog post titled "Ted Cruz, Cuba, Castro and the Giant, Enormous, Humongous Lie."

I keep trying to read this thing. I'm just trying to understand what is "the Giant, Enormous, Humongous Lie." If something is so big it takes 3 synonyms for big to express its bigness, shouldn't it be visible when I skim this short blog post? I would move on, but the man is mayor of my city. Can somebody help me out and read this for me? I read stuff for you all the time. Return the favor?

"The Madison Common Council sent a unanimous message Tuesday that the city will accept Syrian refugees."

"The resolution comes a couple weeks after Gov. Scott Walker said any new Syrian refugees would not be welcome in Wisconsin."

“I don’t think there could be a legal battle because the governor can’t stop what the federal government does in terms of placement of immigrants,” Madison Mayor Paul Soglin said.

“I think it’s just to send a message about who we are as a Madison,” Alderwoman Shiva Bidar-Sielaff said. “Regardless of the redirect from anybody else, I think it’s just a statement about us and Madison and what we stand for.”

"Resistance is not part of civil disobedience."

"Civil disobedience is a symbolic non-violent violation of the law.... The act must be nonviolent, open and visible, illegal, performed for the moral purpose of protesting an injustice, and done with the expectation of being punished."

Madison Mayor Paul Soglin instructs, explaining the arrests of the high school students who, protesting the police shooting of Tony Robinson, may have resisted police efforts to relocate them from the street to the sidewalk.

"In the future, while all of these protests are evaluated on a case-by-case basis, MPD will not be facilitating extended street closures."

In the past, the police have facilitated protests that took over the street. During the big protests of 2011, we saw police cars blocking the streets so cars could not get through. We've had it personally explained to us by a police officer that redirecting the cars was considered the best approach.

I don't know what the precise policy is, but I note the word "extended" in the mayor's statement. I guess the police will facilitate your street-blocking protest in Madison, but not for too long. I hope it means that where there are marches confined to the sidewalks (or State Street), police ought to stop traffic to let the whole march cross an intersection as a single, densely packed group. But the phrase "on a case-by-case basis" hints of: 1. something that permits flash-mobbish takeovers of the streets, and 2. something that could be applied — consciously or unconsciously — in a way that is not viewpoint neutral.

"Voter turnout is expected to be light" today in Wisconsin.

"Only two out of every 10 potential voters are expected to cast ballots."

Statewide, voters will decide whether to re-elect Justice Ann Walsh Bradley to a third 10-year term on the Supreme Court or to elect her challenger, Rock County Circuit Judge James Daley. They will also consider scrapping the 126-year-old practice of having the most senior member of the court serve as chief justice.

And in Madison, Mayor Soglin is up for reelection. His challenger is Scott Resnick, who is 28:

“I’m young, there’s no denying that,” Resnick said during an interview at his modest apartment he shares with his wife, Kelly, on the 14th floor of a student-oriented building with views of the Langdon Street neighborhood and Lake Mendota. “I do have a track record of some large accomplishments all under the age of 30.”...

He cites poverty, homelessness, housing, the achievement gap, employment, transportation and the digital divide — barriers to the Internet and technology for low-income residents and neighborhoods — as top issues.

“I am motivated by doing the big projects,” Resnick said. “I’m trying to help others by dreaming big."

I'm opposed to dreaming big, so I guess I've got to go for Soglin again. As for the judges, as I said yesterday, "I hate voting for judges and the whole charade of these campaigns."

"Our city lost today because the mayor wouldn’t listen to the voices of moderation and pragmatism."

"This should be an issue of local control and, in the end, we are seeing Democrats and Republicans gang up on the city as we were unable to act over the course of months."

Said Madison mayoral candidate Scott Resnick, about a new and bipartisan bill in the Wisconsin legislature that would authorize companies like Uber to operate throughout the state and block local legislation imposing various limitations of the sort Resnick and his opponent Mayor Paul Soglin have been showing enthusiasm for in their campaigns. Soglin said:

"The point is, Uber has got a lot of muscle, they’ve got a lot of money, they have a lot of influence, they’ve done this around the rest of the country, and they have absolutely the best, most vulnerable legislature in the country in Wisconsin to use their campaign dollars to get the legislation they want which is not in the best interest of the riding public. The public needs essential cab service every day of the year, every hour of the day.”