The Irish are an accommodating people. Well, not in everything but in some things. They share their culture with the world. Then they incorporate into Irish life modifications that other nations, especially the United States, have made.
There are at least a billion reasons for American families to be optimistic about President Trump’s latest budget proposal.
So it turns out helicopter parents with money to burn can create a hot mess in the college and university admissions process.
The Senate’s overwhelming 59-41 vote to overturn President Trump’s emergency declaration is a major blow to Trump’s autocratic ambitions.
The best that can be said for President Trump’s $4.75 trillion budget plan for fiscal 2020 is that it has no chance of becoming law. This is almost always true of presidential budgets, because ultimately Congress does the nitty-gritty work on spending legislation. Even by the standards of pr…
Water is Wisconsin’s most precious natural resource. It is to this state what gold once was for California, what oil still is for Texas. Water defines, enlivens and enriches this state.
In early February, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau announced plans to rescind a rule requiring payday loan lenders to accurately assess whether borrowers can repay them. The Obama-era regulation was meant to curtail some of the short-term loan industry’s notoriously predatory practices.
This week House Democrats took up what may be the most important government-reform effort in decades — HR 1, a package of anti-corruption proposals — and buried it under an avalanche of hot takes about anti-Semitism.
The biannual shifting of the clocks took place Sunday morning, and you might still be a little discombobulated. The transition to daylight saving time each March means losing the extra hour of night we enjoyed when the clocks shifted back four months earlier, and it can take a while for slee…
Wisconsin’s largest newspaper and a small Madison paper produced mostly by teens are among the honorees of the 2019 Openness Awards, or Opees, bestowed annually by the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council. Other winners include a Wausau-based citizens environmental group and a state sena…
If ever there was a group of people we would think wouldn’t have a care in the world, it would be NBA players. Their wealth, talent and fame are beyond what any of us could imagine for ourselves.
In a Monday editorial, The Gazette gave a “Thumbs down to inflated property assessments.” The piece incorrectly interprets that a settled lawsuit carries the same legal standing as an actual ruling on the matter by a judge or jury. That is not correct. Recent settlements of big-box “dark sto…
The measles vaccine does not increase the risk of autism. A major new study confirms this fact, which has been accepted science for years.
Gov. Tony Evers last week released his state budget proposal for the 2019-21 biennium. The amount of money going to various state agencies and programs will undoubtedly change as the budget works its way through the Legislature. However, the governor’s proposal marks a stark contrast in prio…
Gov. Tony Evers has included some strong priorities in his state budget proposal.
Last week marked the 50th anniversary of Tinker vs. Des Moines School District, in which the Supreme Court ruled in favor of students who had been suspended for coming to school wearing black armbands to protest the Vietnam War.
For the past 20 years, I’ve walked at least nine miles a day on the body shop floor of the General Motors plant in Lordstown, Ohio, where I help assemble the Chevy Cruze. In a few weeks, when GM shutters our plant, I’ll walk my last mile.
I recently took a walk in my neighborhood on one of our milder days. I like to walk and bike in the Janesville because I get an opportunity to talk to people and get a different perspective. I was disappointed but not surprised to have to walk on sidewalks that were icy, and in some cases snow covered.
Someone pass the smelling salts. The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals on Tuesday issued another rebuke to the Justice Department in its quest to block the AT&T-Time Warner merger and unanimously affirmed the trial judge’s ruling. As a legal matter this is a stone-cold knockout.
To many Roman Catholics worldwide, the very fact of senior bishops listening to victims of clerical sexual abuse and the pope condemning the evil in vivid language no doubt came as a shock. The main body of the church has long shifted away from the United States and Western Europe, and the f…
The American political system is sick, and Bernie Sanders is the cure.
In the two years since the fake-news problem on Facebook and other major social media networks burst into the spotlight, the companies have taken one dramatic action after another to try to rid themselves of disinformation. At Facebook, for example, the company deleted more than 2.8 billion …
The Green New Deal resolution introduced in Congress calls for a massive U.S. mobilization over 10 years to achieve the goal of net-zero greenhouse gas emissions while creating millions of high-wage jobs and sustainable economic growth. Unfortunately, while the science and need for federal action on climate change are clear, we can’t expect serious policymaking on the topic to come out of Washington until 2021 at the earliest.
Amazon.com Inc.’s decision to ditch its plans for a New York headquarters doesn’t augur well for governments and corporations intent on using taxpayer money to fund job-creation schemes.
After eight years of reforms, Wisconsin is in a great position. Our economy is strong and unemployment continues to be at historic lows. Moreover, our state budget has a $2.4 billion surplus for the upcoming budget cycle. This healthy surplus has been achieved while K-12 schools are funded a…
On Thursday, Pope Francis convened a long-awaited meeting of Catholic bishops and other church leaders to frame a global response to the abuse by clergy of “minors and vulnerable adults.” The Vatican considered this so-called summit meeting so important that it asked the U.S. Conference of C…
By some scientific measures, Donald Trump’s presidency is not an aberration but part of a long-running trend. In his use of language, Trump is off the charts in his absence of analytical statements, as well as his expressions of confidence. Both of those tendencies are correlated with succes…
Here a drone, there a drone. Everywhere a drone. Drones, the light ones, not the big military ones that chase bad guys around the Middle East and elsewhere, are beginning to do heavy lifting.
The Supreme Court this week struck a blow against one of the most insidious practices of the American criminal justice system: the unfair confiscation of property from people convicted—or even merely suspected—of committing a crime. So-called civil asset forfeiture has been a cash cow for po…
Here in Wisconsin there is a tradition of hunting. From the Saturday before Thanksgiving until the Sunday after Thanksgiving, it’s gun deer hunting season. Many schools in northern Wisconsin actually have the entire week of school off because if they didn’t, they wouldn’t have enough teacher…
And now, an Illinois addition to the list of mass shootings that agonize all Americans on somber anniversaries—and that agonize survivors and the families of victims every day of the year. This week already had delivered anniversaries of the Northern Illinois University shooting in 2008, and…
Abraham Lincoln, who was born 210 years ago this month, was president during an era even more rancorous and polarized than our own. Yet he managed to navigate it—not in a way that pleased everyone or made him popular, but rather by keeping the good of the country always in his sights. His pa…
The newly seated Democrats in the House have lessons to learn, but none more than not to tell people what you’re going to take away from them.
It’s time for Wisconsin to rethink the runaway tax break that allows manufacturers and other businesses to pay next to nothing in income taxes. Gov. Tony Evers wants to rein in this wasteful tax break and redirect the benefits to the middle class, but Republican lawmakers are fighting tooth …
As he was dying of AIDS-related pneumonia, the tennis great Arthur Ashe answered a reporter’s question about the greatest burden he had faced in life. The reporter might have expected Ashe to cite his diminishing health. Instead, Ashe, who grew up in segregated Richmond, Virginia, said “bein…
Republican lawmakers have been patting themselves on the back in recent days for their foresight in tying the historical amount of state subsidies Foxconn stands to receive to its actual hiring and investments in Mount Pleasant.
For some, Valentine’s Day is a day not of love but of profound, despairing loneliness. The candies, cards and flowers from kind people can sometimes serve to open a void of despair, a black hole of unhappiness for them. They are people made lonely through disease. Some lonely for life.
In recent decades, U.S. marijuana laws have liberalized substantially. Recreational marijuana use is now legal in 10 states and the District of Columbia, and many more states have legalized marijuana for medical use. In response, legalization opponents have claimed that marijuana use increas…
In 2000, when I was 19 and having an existential and Adderall-fueled nervous breakdown, I came home from college for a long weekend and sobbed in my mother’s arms. She held me and shushed me, and then—feeling like she was out of options, she’d tell me later—took out a fat, round, green pill …
Defending a product that kills 1,300 people a day might seem like a throwback Washington kind of thing, but we have to give U.S. Sen. Richard Burr some credit: He’s finding some new, if weird, ways to defend the cigarette industry.
The more we know about the efforts by officials in Racine to shield public records from public view, the more outrageous it seems.
During the 35-day government shutdown, the country looked on as American leaders repeatedly rolled the dice with both lives and property on the line. Each time, total disaster was narrowly avoided and Americans breathed a sigh of relief. That respite may be short-lived, however, with more fi…
Foxconn’s confusing explanations for what it plans to build in Racine County haven’t changed this reassuring fact:
When President Trump agreed to end the historically long government shutdown on Jan. 26, he said the fiasco he triggered would be repeated in three weeks unless Congress came up with a deal on border security that he could accept. Since then, however, Trump has signaled that he doesn’t care …
