Browsing: Media

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. 

It has been 10 years since Wisconsin overhauled an old set of rules for state teacher licensure (PI 3 and PI 4) and replaced it with a new set called PI 34. This report assesses PI 34 in an effort to learn whether it has made good on its high expectations.

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.

Wisconsin has much to gain by enacting a constitutional amendment requiring a two-thirds majority to raise taxes and fees. Its citizens would be further insulated from a government all too willing to fix deficits with rate increases, and its legislators would need to learn to balance budgets through more sustainable measures.

Encouraging dialogue between universities and their constituents in business, industry, agriculture and general citizenry can focus the educational process on needs.

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.

A Special Report: We sent historian John Gurda across the state to size up where Wisconsin is today, what it is thinking and what it wants.

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.

The recent fiscal challenges facing Wisconsin state and local governments have caused a serious re-evaluation of all aspects of government spending. Yet little attention has been given to the cost of providing pensions to public employees.

The problem is far too severe to be solved by increasing taxes on the wealthy or by cutting the bureaucracy. In other words, nothing that resembles business-as-usual will close Wisconsin’s looming budget hole.

The unfunded liability for these health care costs stands at $2.6 billion, more than double the district’s entire annual operating budget. These costs will ultimately be borne by Milwaukee taxpayers, and, because of the state school funding formula, taxpayers statewide.

Not only would Wisconsin’s households and firms bear the high burden of the costs of the Governor’s Task Force on Global Warming proposals, but these costs will be borne in the near term.

Trends paint the picture of modern legislators who work less, grow older in office and are less likely to lose their seat in a general election. In effect, for a large number of legislators, their legislative job has become their career.

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.

Wisconsin’s criminal justice system is marked by a pronounced cycle of crime followed by incarceration followed by parole followed by repeated crime.