CONLEY COMMENTARY (WSAU) - Something you should remember about Sean Duffy. He has excellent political instincts. How good? On June 16, 2015 Donald Trump descended the golden escalator and announced his candidacy. Sean Duffy quickly identified Trump as the likely Republican nominee. That was by no means obvious. Ther...

CONLEY COMMENTARY (WSAU) - In case you haven't had your coffee yet, here's an easy question. What do you call an evergreen tree that's chopped down and placed in your home? It's typically decorated with lights, ornaments and tinsel. There is no one in my audience who answered "it's holiday tree." Of course, i...

CONLEY COMMENTARY (WSAU) - Last week when Donald Trump and Joe Biden met at the White House, the current president promised a smooth transition. My eye. Since that meeting a mere 5 days ago Joe Biden has made three policy decisions that the Trump Admininstration specifically opposes. You would think that part of a smoo...

CONLEY COMMENTARY (WSAU) - Psychiatrists say over and over again, people will not die for a lie. People only lay down their lives for something they believe to be true. So today let's consider Jesus's apostles, the people who knew him or became his earliest followers after the resurrection. Peter, the disciple who is w...

CONLEY COMMENTARY (WSAU) - How would I describe the Wausau City Budget? A disappointment that could have been much, much worse. The two issues that drove the budget this year were largely out of control of city leaders and new mayor Doug Diny. They were property revaluation, and runaway spending from the past mayor Kat...

CONLEY COMMENTARY (WSAU) - "But, it's for the kids..." When you hear that from someone involved in education, you can be certain they're reaching into your wallet. "For the kids..." can justify all kinds of extravagances. I once joked with my kids that maybe the school forest should be sold off and ...

CONLEY COMMENTARY (WSAU) - Some laws are outdated. When the automobile was brand new, some horses would get spooked by the new Model A. Michigan was the first of several states to pass a law saying that horses had the right of way on public roads. If a horse was spooked, a car driver had to pull over, come to a complet...

CONLEY COMMENTARY (WSAU) - We're less than a week past Election Day, and I'm already tired of hearing what an awful country we are for choosing Donald Trump. It simply isn't true. Trump's critics claim that his improbable comeback is proof that we're a misogynistic, racist, immoral country. Trump's first win in 2016 wa...

CONLEY COMMENTARY (WSAU) - There are many people who were praying for Donald Trump to win this week. Others prayed for Kamala Harris. I tend not to pray for specific candidates, even those who I support. I find myself praying for different things: "God, please give us free and fair elections - without cheating.&qu...

CONLEY COMMENTARY (WSAU) - Usually after a long political campaign, the winning side reaches out to those who lost. The olive branch is something like, "let's find ways to work together." Not this time. Why? Because this election was about two fundamentally different views of the country. One vision won. The ...

CONLEY COMMENTARY (WSAU) - On this morning after election day, half the country is delighted with the results. The other half - not so much. I thought Barack Obama was a bad president. He is obviously intelligent, and very articulate. But I disagreed with most of his policies. And yet, if I were in a news bubble and ha...

CONLEY COMMENTARY (WSAU) What if the election is THIS close? Imagine Kamala Harris pulls out narrow victories in Michigan, Georgia, and Wisconsin. Trump wins Pennsylvania and North Carolina. Those results are probable. If the rest of the map holds true: the election would come down to the states that divide their elect...

CONLEY COMMENTARY - The irony of Kamala Harris appearing in Milwaukee with Cardi B in the closing days of the campaign should be lost on no one. Both women send a horrible message to young women today: Glam onto powerful men, and you just might make it. That's the closing message of her campaign. If you don't know who ...

CONLEY COMMENTARY (WSAU) - I am not a one-issue voter. I do consider a candidate's position on certain issues to be disqualifying. Kamala Harris' and Tim Walz's position on late-term abortions is disqualifying for me. That a baby's life could be snuffed out days before birth is an abomination. My conscience would never...

CONLEY COMMENTARY - Here's a scary Halloween story. What if all the prominent Democrats who are calling Donald Trump a fascist have a different purpose? What if the already suspect that Trump is likely to win, and they are sewing the seeds to disrupt his agenda after the election? Imagine this scenario: a day or days o...

CONLEY COMMENTARY (WSAU) - Donald Trump held a rally Sunday at Madison Square Garden in New York. By any objective measure, it was a triumphant event. There was Donald Trump, in a deep blue state in an even bluer city, returning to his hometown in the closing days of his campaign to speak to a sold-out crowd. So how d...

CONLEY COMMENTARY (WSAU) Election day is 8 days from today. Perhaps results will take another day or two to fully be processed, considering the way Philadelphia, Detroit, and Atlanta count their votes. Which campaign has momentum in these final days? Donald Trump speaks confidently in blue bastions, like his rally la...

CONLEY COMMENTARY (WSAU) - Over the past two weeks I've thought a great deal about the death of Liam Payne. If you don't know who his is - he was a member of the boy band One Direction. He fell to his death off a hotel balcony. He was certainly high or drunk at the time. It's widely thought that he committed suicide. H...

CONLEY COMMENTARY (WSAU) - There is no more raw use of government power than men with badges and guns showing up at your home and forcing their way inside. We associate the "knock at the door" with the former Soviet Union. Yet it happened in Wausau at the home of mayor Doug Diny. His wife was at home, watchin...

CONLEY COMMENTARY (WSAU) - If you register a vehicle in Marathon County, you pay $25 extra. It's a wheel tax, intended to raise more money for road maintenance. Here are two dirty little secrets that you may not know about the wheel tax. First, it was supposed to be temporary. Marathon County enacted the wheel tax in 2...

CONLEY COMMENTARY (WSAU) - Wisconsin has a budget surplus of $4.6-billion. That's how much more our state government has taxed Wisconsinites beyond what our state needs. The money really is what's left over. Our current state budget is fully funded. Our state's rainy day fund is flush with another $2-billion. Yet as so...

CONLEY COMMENTARY (WSAU) - The Al Smith Dinner is a wonderful, and deceptively important, political event. Candidates, Democrats and Republicans, gather at a white tie fundraising dinner, and tell jokes about each other. The event happens late enough in the political cycle that it may be the last time candidates see e...

CONLEY COMMENTARY (WSAU) - In college, my roommate's father was an evangelical minister. He was from India. And my roommate said a few times a year he'd come home and find someone sleeping in his bedroom. When a foreign exchange student from India converted to Christianity, they were often disowned by their family back...

CONLEY COMMENTARY (WSAU) - College campuses are beehives of political activity, and some of the busiest bees are at UW-Madison. 53% of the student body in Madison is from out-of-state, about 26,000. And they're being encouraged to register to vote in Wisconsin. Many of those students are enthusiastic "yes"es...

CONLEY COMMENTARY (WSAU) You remember during the COVID days, if you dared to question the safety of vaccines, or whether they should be required in order to go to work (or to go fishing, for that matter), you'd wake up one morning and find that Facebook, or Twitter, or Instagram had blocked your post. "This inform...