Category: Opinion

With great fanfare, President Dmitry Medvedev has announced his intention to slash bureaucracy by 20 percent. It is a bold attempt to deal with an unmanageable government apparatus, perhaps the chief cause of the country?s persistent economic problems. It is also profoundly mistaken.

Were the Tucson shootings simply an outcome of a single person?s struggle with mental illness or was the shooter driven – at least in part – by the hostile political climate in the U.S.?

Most likely it was a combination of both those factors and many others. That doesn?t let anyone in the political arena off the hook. But it does highlight the need for a much more nuanced debate than we?ve had so far about this tragedy. Unfortunately, even commentators who tried to reintroduce some reason to the post-shooting debates by pointing to the problem of mental illness did so by offering just another monocausal explanation and relying on the same rhetorical tools that got us to into this mess in the first place. [A column by Dietram A. Scheufele, professor of life sciences communication at UW-Madison]

As a professor of ethnic studies, I feel under assault.

Noted: I always tell young journalists that nothing should ever surprise them, and there is no such thing as a dumb question, especially if you don?t know the answer. I?ll be saying it again in a few weeks when I head out to the University of Wisconsin to teach a course in sports journalism. That will truly be another labor of love, and so too has been the one and only full-time job I?ve ever held in my adult life. For that, many thanks to Washington Post Chairman Donald Graham, once a brilliant sports editor himself.

There?s no debate that University of Wisconsin football coach Bret Bielema had a brilliant season and his team?s Rose Bowl loss was a high-quality game played with few on-field mistakes. But I suspect others besides me came away baffled at Bielema?s clock management in both halves.

John Moffitt is something of a free spirit and a free thinker.

These are the four scenarios for the end of the American Century by 2025, says Alfred W. McCoy.

An online reader raised a good question after reading our editorial Sunday calling on the state to give the University of Wisconsin System more flexibility. The reader wanted to know how the UW System compared with other states on a per capita basis.

Sometimes things arent as black and white as they seem to be in a generic, boiler-plate news release. In an Oct. 28 news release from the UW-Madison provosts office, it was announced that Molly Jahn would be “stepping down” Jan. 1 as dean of the UW-Madison College of Agricultural and Life Sciences. (Password required. Email Michael Penn, mpenn@wisc.edu for full text.)

Earlier this month I was quoted saying voters “are pretty damn stupid.” There is only one stupid voter here and that?s me. I made an exaggerated wisecrack in response to a reporter?s question. There was a serious point to it — that voters often want contradictory things like “free lunches” and don?t know all the details about candidates and policies.

There is a warm spot reserved in my heart for Buckingham U. “Bucky” Badger.Always has been; always will be.

The Refocus Wisconsin project did not want to hear from just the experts. It wanted to hear from ordinary citizens as well. So the project executed two of the most thorough and exhaustive polls of state residents in recent memory to understand where average citizens fall on the important issues.

I?m traveling today and therefore likely unable to post, but last night I spoke at the University of Wisconsin on “Civil Liberties and Terrorism in the Age of Obama.” 

For 17 years now, Bob Herbert?s columns in The New York Times have been exposing and challenging the injustices that so many among us endure in their lives. He has long been a favorite of mine, so when he was named to deliver the annual Robert W. Kastenmeier lecture sponsored recently by the UW-Madison?s Law School, I was first in line to get a ticket.

Herbert is, after all, one of the few national political columnists who regularly writes about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and the terrible toll they are taking on the small slice of American society that has been sent to fight them. Unfortunately, the wars are flying under most Americans? radars. He used his lecture to encourage the overflow crowd at the Law School to wake up to what?s happening to our nation because of the wars.

….Herbert agrees with what I?ve said in this column over the years — if we returned to a military draft, we could solve many problems. First, if war becomes necessary, everyone would share the burden, not sweep it under a rug while others do the dirty work. But more importantly, if most of America stands to be affected, there would be more restraint on our leaders in starting a war in the first place. And ending it would become a much higher priority.

Election Day is nearly upon us, but for many voters it has already come and gone. States have aggressively expanded the use of early voting, allowing people to submit their ballots before Election Day in person, by mail and in voting centers set up in shopping malls and other public places.

Working with others, I spent much of the last year trying to get the Dane County Board of Supervisors to sponsor a study of experimenting on monkeys here in Madison, the “Monkey Experimentation Capital of the World.” I learned a few lessons along the way