September 19 - Voter Registration!

 

The League of Women Voters of the La Crosse Area will observe National Voter Registration Day by assisting voters at the City of La Crosse Main Library from 11 am to 4 pm on Tuesday, September 19. All are welcome.

If you haven’t voted since the last presidential election, your record may well have been deactivated unless you replied to the Wisconsin Elections Commission postcard mailing about this process.

On August 4th, as required by state law, the WEC deactivated 108,378 voter records as a cleanup of those who have moved to a new address without re-registering, voters who have died, others who have asked to have their registrations deactivated, and those who simply have not voted. 

You can go to our state’s online site for all voting needs: myvote.wi.gov – a quick, user-friendly service that can be accessed by computer, smart phone or tablet – to check your registration, and if necessary, re-register.

If you have questions we can assist in person at this event, or you can contact us at lwvlacrosse.org.

If you can't make the local event, join in an online smash-up of National Voter Registration Day AND National Talk Like a Pirate Day!

Ahoy!

Join us on the high seas of civic engagement for an unforgettable virtual event on National Voter Registration Day (which also happens to be National Talk Like a Pirate Day)! Mark your calendars for 6:00 p.m. Tuesday, September 19 and prepare to embark on an adventure that will empower you to seize your freedom to vote. Arrr you ready to register? We can promise fun and information, but we can't promise that we'll slow down on the pirate puns!

Register: bit.ly/NVRDPirateParty

What to Expect

• Stories on the importance of voting
• Answers on your voter registration questions
• Create and share fun content about voter registration
• Sessions to text friends with info
• Opportunities to win merch and prizes

Sponsored by the League of Women Voters of Wisconsin.

Wisconsin Water: Issues & Actions

 

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Join an expert group of thinkers and reporters for an informative discussion about Wisconsin’s water heritage and a new initiative to cover the Mississippi River basin. Journalists and speakers will deliver updates on their reporting/topic followed by a Q&A session and discussion about water quality, environment, and sustainability.

Wisconsin Waters: Issues and Actions will be held at the Lunda Center at Western Technical College on Thursday, September 21 from 7 to 9 p.m. Free registration is available here.

Read more about the event and its reasons in this Wisconsin Watch article. They describe some of the programming:

[Wisconsin Watch's Bennet] Goldstein and [Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's Madeline] Heim will be joined by JC Nelson, acting center director for the U.S. Geological Survey’s Upper Midwest Environmental Sciences Center, Lee Donahue, a supervisor from the town of Campbell on French Island, where residents have been drinking bottled water since 2021 because of PFAS contamination in private wells, and a representative from the La Crosse Urban Stormwater Group.

Casey Meehan, director of Sustainability and Resilience at Western Technical College will moderate the panel discussion and a question-and-answer segment with the audience. Lee Rasch, executive director of LeaderEthics a non-partisan, non-profit organization dedicated to promoting integrity in American democracy, will serve as the emcee.

Pride

 FREE - Family Friendly!

Community Groups!

Merchants - Food Vendors!

Kids Activities & more!

Free Speech on Campus

What does free speech mean? Bringing up and discussing difficult ideas? Challenging the status quo? Calling out misinformation? Confronting a powerful hierarchy? Calling for violent acts against individuals or groups of individuals? Bullying people into silence? Lying? Gaslighting? Publishing liars, bullies, and gaslighters? 

Here's what the campus free speech movement means to some of us old folks. 

UC Berkeley student, Mario Savio, 1964

But things are different now. Having won their freedom of speech, at a campus victory rally, Savio noted,

"We're asking that there be no, NO, restrictions on the content of speech save those provided by the courts. And, that's an enormous amount of freedom. And, people can say things, within that area of freedom, which are not responsible. We've finally gotten into a position where we have to consider being responsible, because now, we have the freedom within which to be responsible. And I'd like to say, at this time, I'm confident that the students, and the faculty, University of California, will exercise their freedom with the same responsibility they've shown in winning their freedom."niversities started designating "free speech zones," outside of which, speech was restricted, 

The boundaries of responsibility are broken. Dishonest speech seems to have been weaponized to encourage violence and mistrust in basic institutions. Marketing and manipulation, wrapped in free speech, are not meant to further understanding and connection. Then what?

Does free speech mean a Nazi must be allowed to encourage violence or a dominion isn't must be able to push for restrictions on rights for fellow citizens? 

Respectful disagreement, maybe, can't easily occur in a hierarchy. Where one party holds control over or can affect the well-being of the other, can the speech of the powerful party really be non-threatening, and can the speech of the threatened party really be free? Maybe this program will help answer those questions. 

"LeaderEthics is proud to be a partner with the D.B. Reinhart Institute for Ethics in Leadership at Viterbo University in presenting A Conversation About Free Speech on College Campuses. This free event will be held at 7pm on Tuesday, September 19th at the Weber Center for Performing Arts, 428 Front Street S., La Crosse."

One of the panelists, apparently, "a champion for integrity and community collaboration," might be asked if publishing lies and threatening opinion articles and cartoons is responsible speech or not. Get more information here.

A raffle, a plan

This raffle is open to anyone. First prize is an e-bike or cash. Second prize is a B&B stay with spending money. You need not be present at the 10/21 drawing to win. The money raised is for a good cause.

🌎🇺🇸🌎🇺🇸🌎🇺🇸🌎🇺🇸🌎🇺🇸🌎🇺🇸🌎

If you're not gearing up to vote for the sane candidates in 2024 , help others vote, and do whatever you can to make sure we are not participants in the end of America as we know it, you have not been paying attention.

For the past few months, news outlets have reported on a comprehensive 180-day plan being cooked up by a right-wing think tank, The Heritage Foundation, that would immediately jerk the country into Republihell should #TFG or one of his sycophants win the presidential election in 2024. 

Project 2025 (you can read it online) would double down on the unprecedented changes made after Trump took office in 2017--filling public service positions with partisan ideologues, packing courts with Federalist Society hacks, using laws to benefit wealthy cronies' businesses, selling off public assets to the highest bidders, and weaponizing programs against the vulnerable groups they were set up to protect. And forget about climate action.

Here's a description of some of the environmental changes in store if P25 gets its way from The Guardian:

The guide’s chapter on the US Department of Energy proposes eliminating three agency offices that are crucial for the energy transition, and also calls to slash funding to the agency’s grid deployment office in an effort to stymie renewable energy deployment, E&E News reported this week.

The plan, which would hugely expand gas infrastructure, was authored by Bernard McNamee, a former official at the agency. McNamee was also a Trump appointee to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. He previously led the far-right Texas Public Policy Foundation, which fights environmental regulation, and served as a senior adviser to the Republican senator Ted Cruz.

Another chapter focuses on gutting the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and moving it away from its focus on the climate crisis. It proposes cutting the agency’s environmental justice and public engagement functions, while shrinking it as a whole by terminating new hires in “low-value programs”, E&E News reported. The proposal was written Mandy Gunasekara, who was the former chief of staff at the EPA under Trump.

The guide also features a chapter on the Department of the Interior written by William Perry Pendley, who controversially led the Bureau of Land Management under President Trump and worked to eliminate drilling regulations.

Now is the time to pay attention. If you were afraid the current administration isn't doing enough to stop drilling and fracking and subsidies for fossil fuel companies, wait 'til the other guys take control. Or do something now.