Friday, March 29, 2013
Shorewood resident and candidate for Shorewood Village Board, Paul Zovic, discusses why he is running for trustee.
Editor's Note: Paul Zovic is a Shorewood resident and candidate for Shorewood Village Board. The views in this letter are his own and not in anyway representative of the views of Patch or its staff. I am running for Shorewood Village Trustee because I have a profound commitment to and deep concern for our community. In the coming years we will face continued pressures to deliver services at desired levels, maintain affordability for residents, and provide amenities for our businesses and their customers. Addressing these matters requires the ability to listen, to learn and to lead. It requires knowing that the best decisions aren’t always the easiest and that decisions that favor the special interest or the loudest groups aren’t always …
Thursday, March 14, 2013
Shorewood residents and parents of students Nicholas Hayes and Joanne Lipo Zovic discuss the school district.
- OPINION
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Thursday, March 14
Editor's Note: Nicholas Hayes and Joanne Lipo Zovic are Shorewood residents and parents of students in Shorewood schools. The views in this letter are their own and not in anyway representative of the views of Patch or its staff. If you were to nominate a community and its school system to be a national model, Shorewood would be among the front-runners. Ask your neighbors. Many, if not most, will tell you they chose Shorewood for the schools. They saw, like our families did when they were younger, modestly higher property taxes in return for a world-class educational opportunity for their children delivered in a multi-cultural, multi-generational community. They’ll add that it’s not just the core curriculum that is attractive, but the …
Monday, February 18, 2013
Most of the cash in high court campaign will spent by conservative and liberal outside groups — not the candidates themselves.
On Tuesday, Wisconsin will hold a primary election for state Supreme Court, narrowing the field from three candidates to two. Then the race will begin in earnest. Justice Patience Roggensack, who has already served one 10-year term on the state’s highest court, is expected to survive the cut. Her challengers are Ed Fallone, a Marquette University Law School professor, and Vince Megna, a Milwaukee lawyer specializing in suing auto companies. The general election is April 2. Between Jan. 1 and Feb. 4, according to the most recent reporting, Roggensack had raised about $200,000, compared to Fallone’s $75,000 and Megna’s $0. Roggensack reported having $219,154 cash on hand, compared to Fallone’s $63,713 and Megna’s $5,340. Most of Megna’s …
Monday, February 4, 2013
Being a farm girl myself, this ad reminded me just how cool calling yourself a "farm girl" really is.
I am the daughter of two parents, who grew up in Cleveland, Ohio. And when I was 10, they bought a farm in Wooster, Ohio. And when I saw that Dodge Ram commercial during the Super Bowl last night, which featured Paul Harvey reading the poem God Made a Farmer, it brought up all of these wonderful (and emotional feelings) I have about growing up on a farm. My parents didn’t know that there is no hobby in farming – only a commitment to working until the work is done and the work is never done. We started off with three hogs, and two steers, then quickly grew to having 300 hogs, a few horses, and an orphaned goat named Gabby. We owned a 1942 Case Tractor that had a crank start and an electric start that came with a plow and a manure spreader…
Sunday, February 3, 2013
From submitting a DNA sample when arrested to comparing the President to the Three Stooges, Patch bloggers weighed in on a variety of topics this week. Here is a look at some of the most popular posts over the past week.
Blog posts in Wisconsin Patches this past week ran the gamut — from mental health to gun control to bullying. Every day, Patch's Local Voices bloggers share information, insight and opinion about what matters to them. Here's a selection of blogs from throughout the past week. In, "Mental illness and Violence: An opinion," Patch Local Voices contributor Tracy Craft takes a look at President Barack Obama's movement to require more mental health screenings in an effort to decrease violence in America. "Passport Please" garnered more than 114 comments in just a couple of days on Patch. Rees Roberts asks if no longer allowing people to post anonymously online would help develop more respectful and responsible posting. Drawing from current …
Saturday, February 2, 2013
2012 was the most expensive election in the "history of the world," and advocate says it's all the U.S. Supreme Court's fault.
During a recent news conference at the state Capitol, Lisa Graves, executive director of the Madison-based Center for Media and Democracy, made an astonishing claim. “This past election, in 2012, was the most expensive election in U.S. history,” Graves said. “In fact, it was the most expensive election in the history of the world.” She later pointed to articles that backed this up, at least in terms of total amount. The Jan. 22 event, before a mostly empty room, highlighted a new report tracking spending in the 2012 elections, the first since the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 ruling in Citizens United. That ruling, which equated money with speech and barred government from restricting “independent” spending on political campaigns, opened two …
Monday, January 21, 2013
What's blocking Wisconsin from implementing new, tougher laws against drunken driving? It could be "the dollar factor."
Mark Grapentine is a seasoned observer of state politics. He was an aide to then-state Rep. Scott Walker and a policy adviser to then-Gov. Tommy Thompson. For the past decade, he’s been a lobbyist for the Wisconsin Medical Society. In this capacity, he’s pushed for tougher state drunken driving laws — and noticed that, despite an absence of pushback, these laws have stayed mostly the same. “It has been interesting to watch how there has been a lack of progress in an area where there seems to be a tremendous amount of agreement on the need to do something,” Grapentine says. Wisconsin remains the only state where first-offense drunken driving is not a crime, although the civil penalties include license suspension and substantial fines. Two …
Sunday, January 20, 2013
Republican lieutenant governor says Wisconsin is "in better shape today than we were before, and we're not done yet."
With a collective sigh of relief, we can now look back at the time since Governor Walker and I took office, and size up the accomplishments of the last two years. Although we've seen things unprecedented and unpredictable, our experiences have made us stronger. We have a lot to be proud of. Our successes give us new perspective, though, and through the lens of a state pursuing economic competitiveness, we see we have a lot of room to grow in our future. Despite the rampant wrong turns from our federal government, Wisconsin is finally on the path to prosperity. We inherited a $3.6 billion budget deficit that has been balanced without raising taxes. After seeing nearly 150,000 jobs lost under the last three years of the previous …
Wednesday, January 16, 2013
The Democratic state lawmaker said while she disagrees with the "unrealistically rosy picture Governor Walker painted in his speech about the ‘state of our state’ tonight, he highlighted many general themes I believe we can."
- OPINION
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Wednesday, January 16
Saturday, January 12, 2013
Gov. Scott Walker looks at the upcoming legislative session as lawmakers return to work.
Each week, Gov. Scott Walker delivers a weekly radio address. The following is the transcript from the address titled A Look Ahead. Hi I’m Scott Walker. Two years ago, Wisconsin was facing a $3.6 billion budget deficit and the state had an unemployment rate of 7.5 percent. Today, Wisconsin has a $341 million surplus and we set money aside in the rainy day fund for the first time in two consecutive years. The unemployment rate is 6.7 percent. In 2010, a mere 10 percent of employers surveyed said the state was headed in the right direction. Chief Executive Magazine ranked Wisconsin as the 41st state for business rankings. In 2012, 94 percent said Wisconsin was headed in the right direction. Chief Executive Magazine moved our ranking up to…
Students First
8:19 pm on Sunday, March 31, 2013
Paul Zovic said in an editorial on April 1, 2011, "there should be no doubt at this point in time, public education in Wisconsin is facing unprecedented pressures (some even claim that an all out attack is under way)". He states that funding in 2011 was cut by $1.95 million. He fails to place that $1.95 million cut into context. Yes, the State cut funding by $1.95M while at the same time giving … more ›