For a whole lot of people, the reaction to former Milwaukee Alderman Michael McGee Jr.’s federal conviction for extortion and bribery was simple. These are the people who see the world in black and white. They have been conditioned by movies and TV—and that allegedly nonfiction media cousin, journalism...

There are very good reasons why oily guys have been stereotyped as the sorts of villains who twirl their mustaches and tie innocent young women to railroad tracks. But now, as we are nearing the end of eight years of government of, for and by the oil industry, we may have finally reached the point in our history...

About a year ago, on one of those television panel shows where we all pretend to know everything, I was railing about the shortsightedness of the U.S. auto industry in cranking out huge SUVs that could be seen from space at a time of rising gas prices.

As someone who opposed the Vietnam War and didn’t spit on a single soldier, I have never believed those stories about servicemen in uniform encountering a tsunami of expectoration upon returning from Southeast Asia.

A former Milwaukee elected official just completed his first year behind bars—and he hasn’t been convicted of any crime. This man is being held without bail even though he has deep roots in the community and is not considered a risk to flee the city—though a lot of people in power wish he would.

Of all the media clichs about the current presidential race, perhaps the most absurd is describing a ticket headed by Sen. Barack Obama with Sen. Hillary Clinton as his running mate as “a dream ticket.” Talk about your bad dreams.

When we were growing up, we had a cliche about the menu for people behind bars: bread and water. In Wisconsin right now, those who run incarceration facilities are holding the bread and increasing the water. With food prices rising, authorities responsible for the enormous number of people we incarcerate are...

Having been an active participant in the court-ordered busing to integrate Milwaukee’s public schools, I would be the first to admit that it didn’t turn out to magically create quality public schools for every child. Neither will ending busing.

The hottest shoot-’em-up filmed in Milwaukee isn’t the upcoming Dillinger movie starring Johnny Depp. It’s a video posted on the popular Web site YouTube by the Milwaukee Police Department. Police claim they posted the Milwaukee shootout filmed by a surveillance camera at Villard Food & Liquor on the...

Twenty years ago, when I was diagnosed in adulthood with so-called “juvenile” diabetes, it confirmed what a lot of my friends had long believed—that I was still a kid at heart. Fortunately, ever since Dr. Frederick Banting and a young graduate student named Charles Best discovered insulin in the early 1920s...

It’s appalling enough that a little-known, small-time judge with no apparent qualifications defeated Wisconsin’s only African-American Supreme Court justice by running a squalid, deceptive campaign that equated the distinguished justice with a black child molester.

Don’t tell anybody, but Milwaukee County Executive Scott Walker is facing his first major challenge by a successful, established politician, Democratic state Sen. Lena Taylor, since he rode into county office as a reform candidate six years ago.

If it’s such an overwhelming advantage to be a black man running for president of the United States, it’s amazing that the first 43 have been white. No doubt Geraldine Ferraro expects the next 43 presidents to be African American...

When a report by the Special Investigations Unit of the Milwaukee Police Department (MPD) jumped into a partisan political debate—by siding with Republicans to recommend eliminating voter registration on Election Day and requiring photo IDs at the polls—Gov. Jim Doyle wanted to know why MPD should be dictating...

After Wisconsin has poured hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars into private school vouchers for the past 18 years, the first comparison of student performance reveals that the program hasn’t made any difference in the education of poor children.

Even though it is now just one of 11 straight victories for Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, the Wisconsin presidential primary could go down in history as the turning point that secured the Democratic presidential nomination for the nation’s first African- American president.

When we hear that sedition is raging out of control at the University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee, that it’s prompting student government to ban free speech on campus, citizens everywhere have a right to be alarmed. What’s alarming, of course, ...

California case reveals that crimes against 10 teenagers in Milwaukee were covered up in a co-conspiracy with powerful institutions. It’s hard to sympathize with the Milwaukee Catholic Archdiocese’s claim that it could face financial ruin as a result of paying for its past misdeeds when it continues to try to cover up those misdeeds.

It’s hard to sympathize with the Milwaukee Catholic Archdiocese’s claim that it could face financial ruin as a result of paying for its past misdeeds when it continues to try to cover up those misdeeds. For years, the church here had plenty of powerful co-conspirators helping them keep quiet about crimes against children.

It’s hard to know which is worse—to be accused of total indifference toward the lives of 400 people locked in a building with no fire protection or to be accused of continuing the racist tactics of Southern sheriff Bull Connor.

Now that George Bush’s economic policies have finally put the country on the brink of financial disaster, even Republicans appear to tacitly acknowledge that the administration’s rationale for exorbitant tax breaks to the wealthy...

We talk so much about the value of education and the need to reduce dropouts that it may surprise some people that nearly half of all freshmen in the Milwaukee Public Schools have been ordered not to come to school.

Sen. Barack Obama’s history quaking win in the year’s first presidential contest in Iowa prompted one particularly absurd journalistic analysis to suggest that Obama’s victory showed that America had finally become colorblind.

Something new seems to be spreading from Milwaukee politicians. Unbelievably, local officials have begun expressing something that sounds remarkably like political courage regarding criminal justice. Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm gave a year-end interview to the local newspaper looking back on his first year in office.