How Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett gets elected governor of Wisconsin
The email from the Republican partisan might as well have had a sound file attached of him laughing and chortling. He was among a number of activists -- Democrats and Republicans alike -- whom I asked...
View ArticleDave Cieslewicz may be best for Madison -- but what are our other options?
You have to like Dave Cieslewicz as mayor. He seems almost the perfect fit for a progressive-minded city filled with gently graying baby boomers. He's funny in a self-deprecating way. He's calm and...
View ArticleGive trains a chance: Dane County conservatives are wrongly trying to derail...
Local politics, lately, are kind of like a funhouse mirror. Everything is weirdly distorted. Take the recent push to force a commuter rail referendum on the November ballot. Advocates say the public...
View ArticleConsider other options on Overture Center
When pianist Olga Kern began playing the Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No. 2 at the Madison Symphony Orchestra's season opener a few Fridays ago, the first gentle notes hung in the air. I could hear the...
View ArticleWisconsin civil servants and their unions face an increasingly hostile world
In September, before the Chazen Museum of Art began stashing some of its collection to make room for construction, I stopped in to see John Steuart Curry's iconic paintings of the Midwestern...
View ArticleWisconsin public sector jobs: Okay pay, great bennies
Public employees have it good in Wisconsin, but not necessarily as good as critics think. Begin with the fact that the state is relatively parsimonious when it comes to hiring. Wisconsin ranks 4lst in...
View ArticleMadison needs to embrace the future with a different mindset
In the mid-1990s, the Common Council's finance committee met behind closed doors to consider the city's economic offer to keep the expanding medical software company Epic Systems in Madison. "The...
View ArticleMy 17 favorite concerts of 2010, from Milwaukee to Stoughton to Madison
Chalk it up to one in a series of booking coups by the best venue of 2010 (in my opinion), the 475-seat Stoughton Opera House. I saw stellar jazz, country, blues and classical music in the beautifully...
View ArticleTim Cooley's exit reflects ongoing struggle over mayoral control
In government, bad news often comes on Friday afternoons, in hopes it will be lost in the weekend shuffle. So it was telling that as the long Martin Luther King Jr. weekend began on Jan. 14, Mayor Dave...
View ArticleHizzoner vs. Mayor Dave: Two iconic Madison pols battle to lead a threatened...
When Paul Soglin is asked why he's running for mayor once again after two earlier stints in office, he cites his love for Madison and tells an anecdote involving his wife, Sara, who encouraged him by...
View ArticleHizzoner vs. Mayor Dave: What they regret
Credit the Downtown Madison Rotary for asking the candidates for mayor a revealing question at a recent forum: What was your biggest failure?
View ArticleHizzoner vs. Mayor Dave: Who led on Overture?
The city's salvage job of the financially collapsing Overture Center for the Arts poses another leadership contrast between Madison's two mayoral candidates.
View ArticleGeorge Austin: The end of an era
This article originally appeared in "Isthmus" on Sept. 19, 1998.
View ArticleCaution needed on a proposed Madison Public Market
Launching a good project at the wrong time and in the wrong place can be disastrous, as Madison history shows.
View ArticleAugust 25, 1978: Don't drive in Madison
First of all, you must realize you're not meant to drive in downtown Madison. It's a basic fact of life here, like the ungodly cold winters and the packs of drunken high school students who roam the...
View ArticleNew Urbanism conference highlights Madison's successes and its challenges
New Urbanists "love" Madison. For a beaming Al Fish, UW-Madison's associate vice chancellor, that was the message last week when he chatted with attendees of the Congress for the New Urbanism's...
View ArticleCan unions reboot for the 21st century?
One can only marvel at how masterfully Gov. Scott Walker gutted Wisconsin's public employee unions. This was deft work, surgically precise in its neutering of 50 years of collective bargaining rights....
View ArticleAlliant Energy Center needs help
If you define a problem in the wrong terms and fail to see the larger context of why something is screwing up, chances are your solution will fail. Take the Overture Center for the Arts and its...
View ArticleLooking back at 9/11: One more casualty
On Tuesday morning, we're back at the White House for a tour arranged by 2nd District Rep. Tammy Baldwin. Her chief of staff, Bill Murat, is accompanying a dozen or so Badgers for the 8:45 visit. We...
View ArticleLooking back at 9/11: Responses to the "Isthmus" essay from Washington D.C.
The following letters were sent in response to an essay by former "Isthmus" editor Marc Eisen about his experiences while visiting the White House during the 9/11 terrorist attacks. His reply follows....
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