I met Kevin Fischer in 1996 when he was a reporter for AM620 WTMJ, the local Republican talk radio station, and I’ll say that when I talked to him he seemed to be a pretty good guy. Yes, he’s a republican, and yes he works for State Senator Mary Lazich (R-New Berlin), but on a personal level, he seems like a pretty good guy. (Then again, so does JB Van Hollen but time will tell on that one.)

Fischer is now blogging for the Journal-Sentinel‘s Franklin affiliate. It will be interesting to see what comes of it.

Looking back, it’s not surprising that Fischer and I agreed on the issue he was interviewing me for. I was working on a resolution to explore shaming penalties in Milwaukee County. By and large, this is now considered a conservative issue and there are some that would probably want to strip me of my liberal credentials because of it. But for me, what it comes down to is whether it makes sense to seek an alternative to incarceration that would possibly divert people out of the criminal justice system and call upon their own moral codes to draw them away, or whether it makes sense to warehouse the offender with hardened criminals and assure they’ll be well trained in the tricks of the criminal trade by the time they get out.

Both Fischer and I believe in the former, although I’m not sure if it’s for the same reasons.

On a political level, Fischer has taken some pretty hard core, right wing stands on the PBS talk show, Interchange. He’s clearly representing the neo-con fringes of the Republican party. Whether he chooses to take the same extreme stands on his blog is yet to be seen.