☀️ Good morning!

It’s Sunday, August 31, 2025

🇺🇸  Happy Labor Day! And we mean that sincerely because it’s a holiday that didn’t appear by happenstance.

🌅  Summer is bookended by Memorial Day and Labor Day. It doesn’t seem that terribly long ago that these weekends were little more than footnotes on a calendar to explain why we had a day off of work and wouldn’t get any mail. I’m glad things are changing in our recognition of these  special days, but there’s still work to do.

🎖️  We do a better job these days of making sure we take time on Memorial Day weekend to remember those who gave their lives for the country that enables us to have freedoms we should never take for granted.

🛠️  Similarly, I believe no one should let Labor Day weekend come and go without acknowledging those whose sacrifices enabled us to have lives that are no longer dominated (or dictated) by an employer. Holidays, weekends, the 40-hour work week, workplace safety, employment civil rights  — these things didn’t just happen. There was once tremendous (and sometimes deadly) resistance to the idea of workers’ rights from people with lots of power, money, and connections. 

From the Bay View Massacre of 1886 to Scott Walker’s Act 10 in 2011 and Donald Trump’s war on a civil service (and a CDC) free of partisan abuse, there is no shortage of reminders that America needs its workers more than it needs billionaires or the political lackeys who do their bidding.  Thank you to America’s working class. We hope you all get a little extra time to relax and enjoy your life away from the workplace.

Savor your day. And stay up to date with our weekday newsletter, our social media posts, and our morning radio show.

⏮️ Last Week: President Trump is attacking mail-in voting without any kind of meaningful public support. And that was reflected in last week’s question as well. It seems the president has no compassion for the elderly, the disabled, and those whose working conditions don’t allow for traditional one-day voting. 

As expressed by Herb in Cottage Grove: “I, for one, am sick of staggering over ice, through snow, or in the rain with my walker in order to vote in our village hall.”

⏭️ This Week: Should “Dreamers” be protected or deported? There are more than a half-million young people who were brought to this country at very young ages by parents who were undocumented immigrants at the time. The US is the only country they have ever known. Many have gone on to attain college and graduate degrees, fill essential roles in the workforce, and start families.

And yet a president who pledged to go after undocumented violent criminals seems fixated instead on rounding up and deporting young adults to countries they’ve never known.

Is that right? Are they fair game? Or do they deserve an opportunity to become citizens despite their parents’ decisions to bring them here many years ago?

🄰  –  Dreamers deserve a path to citizenship, if they’ve been law abiding.

🄱  –  Dreamers deserve to be deported. They have no right to stay here.

🄲  –  I’m not ready to say they can stay. For now, can we just leave the question open and focus on violent criminals like Trump promised?

To answer this week’s question or to suggest a different answer, hit reply or email me directly at pat@couriernewsroom.com, and we may share it in a future newsletter or on our radio show.

Around 50 labor and civic leaders from around Wisconsin have co-signed a petition that spells out the values they want to see in Wisconsin’s next governor and all Democratic Party candidates in 2026.

One of the petition’s co-author’s, Jon Shelton, is the Wisconsin president for the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and a UW-Green Bay professor of democracy and justice studies. Shelton told us the petition’s platform — including guaranteed child care, a public option for BadgerCare, a $20 minimum wage, and expanded collective bargaining rights for every Wisconsin worker — should not be a heavy lift for progressive candidates.

“You have a growing amount of people in this state who are living with massive amounts of income inequality,” Shelton said. “They can’t find great jobs, can’t find good housing, are getting nickeled and dimed by health insurance — if they even have it. And so, every Democrat in the state should be unapologetically talking about strengthening labor, not just because it’s good morally, but because it’s good politically and it’s good institutionally.”

National AFT Randi Weingarten came to Wisconsin this week to take part in a forum about the damage that’s going to be done by the Trump/Republican megabill that makes massive cuts to programs and racks up record deficits to pay for tax breaks for the very wealthy. Weingarten said on our radio show that she sees Trump’s momentum slipping as more Americans learn what was in the bill.

“People voted for him because they wanted a better life.That’s what workers deserve for the hard work they put in every day. But what’s happened is between the increases in prices, the decreases in affordability, and now all this federal policy that seems to make it worse. It’s not a surprise to me that Trump is now changing the agenda and trying to talk about crime, because his economic agenda isn’t working. People are having a harder time right now.”

(x.com/kwiktrip)

The social media team at Wisconsin-based Kwik Trip proves they learned something from the marketing mess created by Cracker Barrel when they tried to “refresh” their look!

1️⃣ JD Vance in La Crosse –  Vice President JD Vance used a speech in La Crosse Thursday to stoke up fears of rampant crime and greedy immigrants, as part of a Trump administration effort to change the national conversation on their on-again-off-again trade war and package of spending and service cuts so unpopular, the president is speculating out loud about a name change. 

Vance repeatedly returned to a claim that the Trump administration was protecting benefits that were otherwise going to undocumented immigrants on a large scale, something repeatedly shown to be false. “We want you to earn a good living in your community. We want you to be able to walk down a city street in broad daylight without getting mugged. We want you to be able to take your family out to a nice meal wherever you want to without the fear of violence from criminals, whether they’re domestic criminals or international drug cartels.” Vance did not expound on whether La Crosse streets are a hotbed of muggings or international drug cartels. 

2️⃣ Megabill’s big price – Gov. Tony Evers’ has released an analysis of the Trump/Republican megabill that says the package of service cuts, deficit spending, and high-income tax breaks will increase costs to Wisconsin taxpayers by at least $284 million in future budgets. The report also says it will cause 270,000 Wisconsinites to lose their health insurance and tens of thousands to lose access to basic food necessities.

“I’ve been clear from the get-go,” Evers said, “that Republicans’ so-called ‘big beautiful bill’ is bad for Wisconsin. And now, it’s also clear this bill is just as bad for Wisconsin taxpayers, who will be forced to help foot the bill for Republicans’ red-tape requirements just to make it harder for folks to get the care they need and food to eat.”

3️⃣ Duffy claims credit for Biden trains – US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy tweeted out lavish praise for Trump over Amtrak’s new NextGen Acela, an updated high-speed train to be used in the northeast corridor of the country! “This is all part of @POTUS’ vision to Make Travel Great Again,” Duffy posted. Only one problem: Trump had nothing to do with it. Like other projects past, present, and future, Republicans are trying to take credit for improvements done during the Biden administration. In this case, the improvements Duffy listed are all from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act and were underway long before Trump took office.

Catch our radio show weekdays from 6-9 a.m. on our Facebook and YouTube pages as well as stations across Wisconsin thanks to our friends at Civic Media. If you can’t listen live, listen on-demand by subscribing on Spotify.

📱 And stay up to date all day with all of our team’s work through our social media feeds, including Instagram and TikTok.

🏁 Thanks for reading our update.

(We’re not sure how we did it, but we managed to avoid any shameless attempt to use the Taylor Swift-Travis Kelce engagement for promotional purposes.) 

Have a great week!

(And if you can’t, well, shake it off.)

(Sorry.)