The Republican Congress went back to work for one last session last week.  Picking up right where he left off before the election, Russ Feingold wrote to his fellow Democrats in Congress, urging them to stand strong and block lame duck GOP efforts to pass unfunded tax cuts and unwarranted wiretapping.  The Feingold essay, published at huffingtonpost.com, elicited cheers and thank you's, [...]

There's some good journalism floating around out there and it's in blog form. Milwaukee Rising blogger, Gretchen Schuldt (formerly of Watchdog Milwaukee) has a long but insightful column on the hatchet job that the Public Policy Forum did on the City of Milwaukee in a recent report.  It turns out that they accused the city [...]

Prior to 1996 I used to tease my friends about their weak constitutions.  They would get sick and I wouldn't. That changed in 1996 where I went through a twice-a-year bout with bronchitis which continued through 2002.  In 2002 my health improved and I haven't been sick since.  So I was thinking to myself, hmmmm, [...]

Chalk this one up in the "you've got to be kidding" category.  Milwaukee County Executive Scott Walker has done a turnabout by blaming the County Board for passing a budget that isn't balanced. Every single budget that Walker has touched he has managed to mangle through deficit spending and phantom revenues.  Just last summer there [...]

The horses just kept coming. The rate of pay for a janitor in oil-rich Houston’s business district is $5.15 an hour — $20 a day – a wage that would be illegal in Wisconsin, where a janitor in downtown Milwaukee starts at nearly double the Houston wage.  Oil giant Chevron, downtown Houston’s corporate leader, posted [...]

I was in Detroit today waiting for my flight to Richmond, VA.  Next to our gate, there was another plane awaiting a flight to Philadelphia.  Everyone in the area took notice of the Marine in the gate area, lingering between the two flights.  After all, how often do you see a Marine in dress blues?  [...]