Browsing: News & Analysis

Several years ago while sitting at my desk I received a curious phone call from a Milwaukee Journal Sentinelreporter working on a story about convicted felons working as lobbyists in Madison. 

Taking small steps to tone down the rhetoric on both sides and demonstrate why increased trust is warranted is a much more realistic and preferable route.

The new program will create an additional expense to the state. However, it is possible that the loss in GPR may be offset by the positive fiscal impact of reducing declining enrollment trends in private schools.

After a first read of Gov. Scott Walker’s recent vetoes, I am reminded of the scene in “Gladiator” in which Joaquin Phoenix takes stock of the Coliseum’s crowd and, eventually, gives into public sentiment and lets Russell Crowe live.

In New Orleans, through the first Recovery School District in the nation, the percentage of students attending failing schools there has been reduced from 78% to 40%.

You just never know … Tucked away in the very last motion passed by the Joint Finance Committee was an item in which the Legislature evicted the Center for Investigative Journalism from University buildings.

What was the most surprising part of the education package passed by the Joint Committee on Finance? 

I recall a conversation I had with a teacher five years ago.  At the time, she was teaching in a suburban Milwaukee school and she clearly missed what had been her passion, teaching in the Milwaukee central city.

Almost two full years ago, right at the height of a heated legislative debate in Madison over whether to expand school choice, Disability Rights Wisconsin and the ACLU filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Justice alleging that schools in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program discriminate against children with disabilities.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a commentary contrasting the tough budget introduced by Governor Walker with the soft, easy on-the-eyes budgets we’ve seen out of Washington.

If the governor’s budget forces some administrators to cut back on staff to the point where they don’t have time to worry about political correctness in the classroom or the lunchroom, that’s fine by me.

I hadn’t seen my buddy Ernie in a few months since I had visited him at St. Mary’s.  That day Ernie was sipping ice water through a bent straw looking paler than usual – which is something for a guy who spends his free time either in a tavern or a betting parlor.

Hey, did you hear the one about how Gov. Scott Walker wants to kill puppies?

There could not have been a sharper contrast between the tension in Madison and the calm in Washington, D.C.

As is the case with any extended crisis, the Wisconsin stalemate has begun to create its own vernacular.  Previously familiar terms and phrases are used in foreign contexts. 

Elizabeth Coggs, the new Democratic state representative for the 10th Assembly District in Milwaukee, is against the Voter ID proposal because, she told me today, many poorer residents of her central city district don’t have IDs and would be disenfranchised if one is now required to cast a ballot.

Peter Barca, a usually levelheaded Democrat, articulated what has been wrong with state government.

You will have to forgive me, you see I’m in the ideas business and, as such, I have a fair amount of disdain for politics.

The street that Mr. T. Quiles lives on with his family on the west side of Milwaukee literally dead-ends into the playground of Luther Burbank School.

As the US implements the transformation of General Motors into “Government Motors,” and the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) and American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) raise government investment and entanglement in the private sector to historic new levels, the question on everyone’s mind is “will it work?”   Oddly enough, clues to the answer of that question may come from an unexpected place:  Iraq.