Republicans who run the Legislature have marched in step on legalizing concealed weapons, barring gay marriage and banning human cloning, but when it comes to amending the constitution to limit taxes, they are a fractious group.
Ten years ago, the University of Wisconsin-Madison was taken to court by several of its law students who challenged a requirement that all students pay a fee to fund student organizations on campus.
The university said the goal of the student fee program was to expose students to a variety of opinions and activities. The law students argued that it violated their free speech by forcing them to support groups they found offensive, such as the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual Campus Center.
The case – Southworth vs. The UW System Board of Regents – was litigated all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, and in 2000, the court ruled that UW-Madison’s student fee program was constitutional, but only if the money was distributed to student organizations regardless of their viewpoints.
The decision, which affected public universities across the country, is now being tested on the campus where it began.
Quoted: Marty Kanarek, professor of population health studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
A University of Wisconsin-Madison professor dismissed this month for a felony conviction collected pornographic images on his school computer for a decade, according to documents released Friday. (Last item)
The woes associated with genetically modified organisms dominate “The Future of Food,” a 90-minute documentary to be shown at the UW next week.
It is a project of Deborah Koons Garcia, widow of the Grateful Dead’s lead singer, Jerry Garcia. She wants people to know the political, health, environmental and global consequences of gene splicing and other biotech triumphs.
Curt Mueller, the chief executive officer of Mueller Sports Medicine in Prairie du Sac and a former University of Wisconsin men’s basketball player, has pledged a $1 million gift to his alma mater.
The gift comes jointly from the Mueller family, including Brett Mueller, the company’s president; Ginger Mueller-Mann, a vice president; and Jeff Mueller, a regional salesman.
Mueller has designated $700,000 to the athletic department, of which $500,000 was designated for the Camp Randall Stadium renovation project. Another $125,000 will go to the Heritage Hall project, a multi-purpose area that will be used for team banquets, alumni receptions and recruiting visits.
Joe Monty, a starting defensive end for the University of Wisconsin football team, sustained facial fractures and other injuries early today when he slammed into the back of a car with his moped.
Monty, a fifth-year senior from Fort Collins, Colo., sustained “numerous facial fractures,” head trauma and lacerations to his face and legs, according to Madison police spokesman Mike Hanson. His injuries were not considered life-threatening, Hanson said.
….It appeared Monty had been drinking before the crash and will likely face a drunken driving citation, Hanson said.
The Crazylegs Classic has become a rite of spring in the Madison area that belongs with the blooming of tulips and daffodils in our yards and algae in our lakes, the Mifflin Street block party just off campus and road construction everywhere else.
“The event has grown in reputation and stature,” said Jim Bradley, the race director of the Classic, which will be held for the 25th time Saturday. “At this point it’s just one of those things you do in the spring in our community.” The Classic can thank Bradley and some others for that.
Science students from West High School will be competing against students from all 50 states in May after winning the 2006 Wisconsin Science Olympiad state tournament last weekend at the UW Engineering Department.
La Follette High’s A team finished second and its B team was sixth, while Memorial High was seventh out of 46 teams.
Editor’s note: Due to a technological error, the top four paragraphs of this story did not appear when it ran in Thursday’s edition on Page A1. The story is reprinted here in its entirety.
The long-standing efforts of unions, students and staff at the University of Wisconsin-Madison to improve the lot of limited term employees could be coming to a successful end.
A proposal to raise 400 of the 1,300 LTEs on campus to full-time status and guarantee a living wage of $10.23 an hour to all LTEs was made Thursday by the LTE collaboration committee to UW-Madison Chancellor John Wiley at a closed-door meeting in Bascom Hall.
A prominent figure in the Watergate scandal, which led to President Richard Nixon’s resignation, will be a featured speaker at a public forum Saturday on the abuse of executive power.
John Dean, who was White House counsel for Nixon and a star witness in the Watergate hearings, will be joined by University of Wisconsin-Madison law professor Stanley Kutler for the forum, “Executive Power: Worse Than Watergate?” The forum will start at 9 a.m. in UW-Madison’s Mitchell Theatre in Vilas Hall, 821 University Ave.
Former University of Wisconsin football player Gino Cruse entered a no-contest plea today to a reduced charge of criminal damage to property and was fined $100.
Cruse, 20, a sophomore defensive lineman from Phoenix, Ariz., was kicked off the football team earlier this month by new head coach Bret Bielema.
While fun lovers revel in the debauchery that is the Mifflin Street Block Party Saturday, city residents averse to raucous crowds, hawk-like police presence and a vastly underage, out-of-town throng will have somewhere else to turn.
“Most people who go to Mifflin are not from Madison, and most people from Madison do not go to Mifflin,” said Chris Dols, organizer of the inaugural Pinckney Street Block Party.
….Dols said the purpose of the Pinckney party is to fill a niche that has been left empty by the Mifflin party’s current format.
The United States is emerging as the prison guard of the world, Angela Davis told a UW-Madison audience Thursday.
Between the prisoners the U.S. is holding in Iraq and Afghanistan and in secret CIA prisons, the county is promoting strategies of incarceration based on torture, said Davis, the former Black Panther Party� member who now is chair of feminist studies at the University of California-Santa Cruz.
The evidence of torture in military prisons only highlights what is already going on in domestic prisons, she said.
The state Assembly narrowly approved a hastily crafted, stripped-down version of a constitutional amendment to limit state spending shortly before dawn this morning after an all-night session.
The Republican-controlled Assembly voted 50-48 to approve the measure shortly after 4:30. Lawmakers struggled to keep their eyes open and several dozed in their seats. Democrats railed against Republicans for trying to pass a constitutional amendment they drafted in the wee hours without a public hearing or committee review.
Just two weeks after announcing its first acquisition, Imago Scientific Instruments said it has raised $3.4 million of funding.
That Imago was able to pull in funding from a number of investors, none of them local, is another sign of the value being created at many of the companies that have been spun out of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said John Neis, senior partner at Venture Investors, a Madison venture capital firm.
University of Wisconsin fans hoping to see the Badgers men�s basketball team play a school other than Wake Forest or Maryland in the ACC/Big Ten Challenge will get their wish next season.
Badgers coach Bo Ryan told fans at the teamââ?¬â?¢s reception Wednesday night that UW’s opponent for the eighth annual event will be Florida State.
In an unprecedented move, Chancellor Carlos Santiago is moving from the official residence that comes with the top post at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and into one of Milwaukee’s priciest condominium buildings.
Santiago said in an interview Thursday that he and his wife, a professor at UWM, had purchased a condo in Kilbourn Tower, where the average unit costs $900,000. He said they would move in after commencement.
“My wife said it’s time to move out of public housing,” he said.
Eleven Milwaukee Public Schools now have mumps cases, the Milwaukee Health Department said Thursday.
A recent survey found that women fret about the shape of their bodies every 15 minutes, even more frequently than men think about sex, if that’s possible.
This insecurity does not seem to bedevil 19 female students at UW-Madison who get bucky naked or nearly so in the May issue of Playboy and its glossy tribute to America’s top 10 party schools.
The state Assembly this morning called for the first constitutional limit on state spending but refused to recommend similar controls on local governments.
The Assembly voted, 50-48, to limit growth of state government’s general fund – its single biggest account, which will spend more than $19 billion this year – to 90% of the average growth in personal income over the previous three years. The general fund includes $11.8 billion in state taxes, fees, and about $6.5 billion a year in federal aid.
In what could be a boon to development of vaccines and targeted therapies, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, in collaboration with a team of international researchers, has created a streamlined, hardy form of the E. coli bacterium by reducing its DNA to its bare essentials.
Small acts of kindness and generosity affect people’s lives in a big way. If you grew up in a supportive, encouraging environment, pass it on. Share your experiences, and wisdom, with others. Use what gifts and talents you’ve been given to improve your community, and when a certain group of people are being overlooked, give them some attention. But, remember, you can’t do it all, so pick the challenges that will lead to positive change.
These are some of the beliefs that help motivate and inspire the six recipients of this year’s YWCA Women of Distinction Awards.
(Plant pathology professor Jo Handelsman is one of the honorees.)
Some will roast and host; another’s twice shy
Ted Horstick and Ryan Well are taking two very different approaches to this year’s Mifflin Street Block Party.
Well — who lives at 448 W. Mifflin, where the residents last year drew more than $11,000 in fines — is locking his doors. But Horstick is ordering some kegs and roasting a pig, like last year.
The longstanding efforts of unions, students and staff at the University of Wisconsin-Madison to improve the lot of limited term employees could be coming to a successful end.
A proposal to raise 400 of the 1,300 LTEs on campus to full-time status and guarantee a living wage of $10.23 an hour to all LTEs was made today by the LTE collaboration committee to UW-Madison Chancellor John Wiley at a closed-door meeting in Bascom Hall.
While Wiley wouldn’t comment to the press, committee member and Dane County Board Supervisor Ashok Kumar told The Capital Times that the meeting went very well, and that Wiley seemed very receptive to the proposal.
Chancellors in the University of Wisconsin System would stop receiving $700-a-month car stipends and start leasing cars through the state Department of Administration under a recommendation by the system’s president that could cost Wisconsin taxpayers more money.
Republican legislators who want constitutional limits on state and local spending will offer a fallback plan today – a strict cap only on state spending – if they can’t get the Assembly to also restrain municipalities and school districts.
Assembly Republicans today unveiled yet another version of a proposed constitutional amendment to limit taxes and spending as leaders acknowledged that no version has enough votes to pass.
The latest version of the so-called Taxpayers Protection Amendment was outlined this morning by Rep. Frank Lasee, R-Bellevue.
Mayor Dave Cieslewicz today pledged to fight against a high-voltage power line through the south side of the city.
He also said he will find more ways to band together with other cities to reach regional solutions that higher levels of government haven’t addressed.
In the mayor’s “State of the City” speech he was to deliver today to the Madison Downtown Rotary Club, Cieslewicz also plugged his idea for a local rail system of electric streetcars, calling diesel commuter rail “not a good fit for our city or region.”
Gino Cruse and Antonio Freeman, each cited recently for marijuana offenses, have been dismissed from the University of Wisconsin football team, continuing a house cleaning by first-year coach Bret Bielema.
The moves were announced in a statement that accompanied the release of the Badgers’ two-deep roster. The release of Cruse and Freeman, who were expected to be reserves next season, means three players have been booted from the program by Bielema.
Residents of University Apartments on the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s west campus say that ROTC exercises in the area known as Eagle Heights are too close for comfort.
“They’re out there in camouflage with weapons that look real. It’s scaring the crap out of us,” said Maggie Shapiro Haskett.
Haskett said that the woody areas near the housing are heavily used by residents for hiking and jogging and that many others use the community gardens.
If the University of Wisconsin opened the 2006 football season today, freshman P.J. Hill would be the Badgers’ starting tailback. Meanwhile, coach Bret Bielema announced that reserve cornerback Antonio Freeman and reserve defensive tackle Gino Cruse would not return.
Gov. Jim Doyle signed an executive order Tuesday directing the state Department of Commerce to spend at least $5 million over an indefinite period of time to encourage more stem cell companies in Wisconsin.
Take my money – please.
You’d think they’d find a way to spend it, but the folks at the supposedly cash-starved University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee are sitting on a $1 million grant from the Indian Community School of Milwaukee.
Spending a million bucks, now that’s the type of problem most university bosses would die for.
Instead, the two sides are only now making progress in this most unusual spat over who’s going to be stuck with the 1999 grant: UWM has finally agreed to keep the loot, which was earmarked to train teachers in educating Indian students.
Mumps has been diagnosed in a 20-year-old University of Wisconsin-Madison student who lives in an off-campus apartment. That student has been asked to stay away from school until he or she is no longer contagious.
Although manufacturing and farming quickly come to mind whenever one thinks of Wisconsin exports, some of the state’s most valuable products are its advances in life sciences.
The state must do a much better job of harnessing that scientific capital for its own economic well-being and future prosperity. These issues were outlined in a series of articles this week by Journal Sentinel reporters Kathleen Gallagher and Susanne Rust.
Richard Meese, a UW-Madison graduate who is an economist and expert on foreign currency exchange rates, has given $1 million to to establish a professorship in applied econometrics at the UW.
“The university laid the foundation for my work success,” Meese, who manages research and strategy on global currency products for Barclays Global Investors and is a former economics professor at the University of California-Berkeley, said in a statement.
The faltering effort by the hard-core right in Wisconsin to put a constitutional cap on local government spending – ala Colorado’s TABOR – is rooted in the idea the state has too many lazy, entrenched, overpaid public employees.
Of course, few Republicans, including gubernatorial candidate Mark Green, have the guts to actually come out and say it that way. Instead, they talk about the need for government to “live within its means” just like all the “hard-working families” in Wisconsin, which we assume means white, suburban, SUV-driving GOP voters, who also own a small business.
But if you read between the lines or listen to the AM radio hate-jocks, it always comes back to the same blame game: too many liberal teachers, too many shovel-leaning streets workers, too many pencil-pushing bureaucrats.
University of Wisconsin-Madison officials today said they have identified the first case of mumps among students here.
A blood test on a female undergraduate, conducted Thursday, came back positive on Monday, said Craig Roberts, epidemiologist with University Health Services. The 20-year-old woman lives off campus, according to a written statement from the university.
Mumps has a two- to three-week incubation period, Roberts noted. Two to three weeks from now will be around the end of the semester, he noted.
Just because you see someone in a wheelchair, don’t assume they need help. Ask the person first, Mark Zupan advised a Madison audience Monday night.
“That’s the worst thing. I hate when people just come up and say, ‘Here, let me push you,’ ” Zupan said. The quadriplegic rugby player and “Murderball” film star is more comfortable pushing other people around — on the field.
He’s also at ease on stage speaking and joking before 400 people, which he did at the Union Theater as the last UW Distinguished Lecture Series speaker of the school year.
Susan Armacost and Ed Fallone are passionate about the morality of human embryonic stem cell research. They are also worlds apart.
Armacost, legislative director of Wisconsin Right to Life, says the destruction of embryos necessary to obtain the cells is murder. Her organization has added embryonic stem cell research to its traditional issues of abortion, euthanasia and assisted suicide.
Fallone, president of Wisconsin Stem Cell Now Inc., says it’s wrong to put limits on research that many believe has the potential to cure diseases, including the juvenile diabetes that afflicts him, his father and his son. He formed his group to advocate for stem cell research in the state after President Bush was re-elected.
Tailback Booker Stanley, who was kicked off the University of Wisconsin football team in February, and cornerback Antonio Freeman, who was suspended indefinitely from the team in January, have inquired about transferring to UW-Whitewater, which reached the Division III national title game last season.
Although the long-term future of human embryonic stem cell research in Wisconsin depends on a political consensus, the issue does not fit neatly within the lines of Republican or Democratic, conservative or liberal.
Quoted: Ray Aldag, a professor of management at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Business.
I HOPE the UW athletic department goes ahead with its tentative plan to permanently bounce rowdy drunks from Camp Randall Stadium.
For some fans the stadium on football Saturdays is simply a large outdoor tavern, and there is a long tradition of taverns banning people who can’t hold their booze from the premises.
….There is one aspect of the athletic department’s plan that may require some tweaking….
A 20-year-old UW-Madison student was taken to a local hospital Sunday night after he was hit by two cars while riding his bicycle in the campus area.
The cyclist was hit by a vehicle traveling south in the 100 block of North Mills Street just before 8:30 p.m. He was knocked into the opposite lane and struck by a second vehicle, which dragged him 60 feet, according to Madison police.
Rumors of a federal crackdown on illegal immigrants in the Madison area spun out of control Sunday, causing fear and panic in the Hispanic community and keeping many children out of school today.
Mayor Dave Cieslewicz said that Mario Mendoza, a Spanish-speaking aide, was preparing a statement for Spanish-language media.
“There’s no truth to the rumors,” Cieslewicz said. “People should just go about their normal daily lives.””We don’t know how it started, but it ran like wildfire in the Latino community,” said Luis Montoto, program director for La Movida radio, the area’s only Spanish-language station.
Remember the good-old days? You know, that time when the UW football team’s annual spring game and the Crazylegs Classic run/walk were held on the same day?
It’s hard to believe, but this will be the sixth straight year that the two events will be held on separate days.
For nearly two decades, the events were linked and signaled the unofficial start of spring in Madison as thousands would converge on the UW campus and downtown areas for a full day of fun in the sun. Now, well, it just isn’t the same.
Two University of Wisconsin-Madison professors will be featured in a new television documentary on global warming. It will premiere on HBO at 6 p.m. today (April 22), which is Earth Day.
Jonathan Foley and Jonathan Patz study climate change and its potential impacts at the UW’s Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies. They are among the experts interviewed during the one-hour program, which is called “Too Hot to Handle.”
Discover “Treasures in the Garden” at the opening reception for artist Rachel Dorn’s master of fine arts exhibition on Sunday (April 23) from 1:30 to 3:30 p.m. in the Allen Centennial Gardens on the UW-Madison campus.
Dorn’s ceramic sculptures, such as “Romanesque Cauliflower” and “Gooseberry,”Ã? will be placed throughout the gardens, located at the intersection of Babcock and Observatory drives. (It is Dorn’s final MFA exhibition.)
It may be a record: 109 special-interest groups have told the state Ethics Board they are lobbying on a proposal that would amend the Wisconsin Constitution to put limits on state and local government spending.
And 81 of them – including local governments, unions, health care providers, the Wisconsin Catholic Conference and AARP – are trying to kill what Republican legislators call the Taxpayer Protection Amendment.
Mentions that Madison, Dane County and the University of Wisconsin-Madison are studying a Madison-area commuter rail line that wouldn’t connect to Metra. Madison is also studying a streetcar system.
An all-but completed agreement between Milwaukee Area Technical College and the University of Wisconsin-Madison promises to achieve at least two worthwhile objectives: making a first-class college education more affordable to local students and promoting racial diversity at Madison. The plan has only one minor shortcoming, but this is likely to be corrected soon.
How many of the people putting away one of Panera’s cinnamon crunch bagels or a big hunk of Cheesecake Factory’s Snickers cheesecake ever think about putting some investment dollars into their favorite restaurant? Richard J. Vanden Boogard does.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison graduate student has spent much of his time this year analyzing some of this country’s fastest-growing restaurant chains, and he’s come up with two that pass his sniff test.
Heather Simmons, the zoo’s pathologist and a researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Veterinary Medicine, arrived from Middleton to perform a necropsy and determine the cause of death of the 207-pound bird.
Two high-profile California companies – neither of which makes a profit – are the business face of embryonic stem cells in the United States.
Geron Inc. and Advanced Cell Technology Inc., which moved to California from Massachusetts in February, have publicly carried the torch for the promise of embryonic stem cells to produce therapies for spinal cord injuries and for diseases ranging from diabetes to Alzheimer’s.
Both are linked to Michael West, Advanced Cell Technology’s top executive and chief scientific officer. West founded Geron and oversaw its funding of some of the research that led to University of Wisconsin-Madison scientist James Thomson’s isolation of human embryonic stem cells in 1998.
For years, two of Wisconsin’s least-known exports have been among its most valuable: the intellectual and investment capital that help power the economic engines of states such as California and New York.
The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, among this country’s most successful university patenting and licensing organizations, has licensed most of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s life sciences technologies to out-of-state companies.
The State of Wisconsin Investment Board – the 25th biggest pension fund in the world, managing $76 billion – has used firms that focus on places such as Boston and the Silicon Valley to make virtually all of its venture capital investments in young businesses.
The work of Wisconsin stem cell scientists is re-emerging as some of the most promising in the world, eight years after the era of human stem cell research dawned in a lab here.
The focus on fundamental research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has been eclipsed at times by the quest for dramatic breakthroughs and massive government funding elsewhere.
http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=418178
For years, two of Wisconsin’s least-known exports have been among its most valuable: the intellectual and investment capital that help power the economic engines of states such as California and New York.
The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, among this country’s most successful university patenting and licensing organizations, has licensed most of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s life sciences technologies to out-of-state companies.
The State of Wisconsin Investment Board – the 25th biggest pension fund in the world, managing $76 billion – has used firms that focus on places such as Boston and the Silicon Valley to make virtually all of its venture capital investments in young businesses.
Now human embryonic stem cells, first isolated in UW research labs, are providing a once-in-a-generation opportunity to change that dynamic.
A week from today, Paul Chryst was reminded, will mark 20 years.
“I would have never guessed that if someone had asked,” the University of Wisconsin offensive coordinator responded. “It really doesn’t feel like 20 years.”
A week from today — April 28 — will serve as a sad reminder to many of that Monday afternoon 20 years ago when the Badger football program took a devastating hit.
