Reader's Digest Version Of Law School Forum

Last Friday, we posted a 56-minute video of the discussion at last week's Justice, Money and Politics forum at the UW Law School. If you don't have an hour to spare to watch the whole thing, you can watch this 7-minute version.

Justice, Money and Politics on YouTube

Tuesday night's forum at the UW Law School featured state Supreme Court Justices Ann Walsh Bradley and Patrick Crooks, Wisconsin State Journal editorial page editor Scott Milfred and yours truly.

Spitting Out The Multivitamin

UW Professor Ken Goldstein is fond of telling anyone who will listen that negative political ads are good for you, going so far as to call them a "multivitamin for the democratic process."

If there's even a whiff of aptness in that analogy, then recent elections like Wisconsin's last two state Supreme Court races proved one thing conclusively. It's possible to overdose on vitamins.

In this fall's elections, a bunch of phony front groups and party satellites held voters' noses and tried pilling us again, but the public wasn't swallowing what they were trying to force down our throats. One of the big stories of the 2008 election was the public's repudiation of gutter politics. Smear campaigns failed, as the Eau Claire Leader-Telegram pointed out, from the national stage to the local scene.

Now that's something worth celebrating.

The Change We Need?

If Barack Obama's going to change Washington, this was a strange way to start.