Free Republic

Last week it happened again. Another school. Another disturbed young person. Another needless firearm legally purchased. Another good person dead as a result. Last Tuesday, a 28 year-old former Spanish teacher named Shane Schumerth walked into the office of Dale Regan, the principal of the school where he had been recently fired, pulled out an AK-47 assault rifle and killed her before committing suicide. A week earlier, T.J. Lane, a 17 year-old Ohio boy, took out his .22 semi-automatic pistol and killed three people and injured two more. And the week before that, a third-grader grabs the family's legally bought...

Dave Cieslewicz is sick and tired of gun violence. So to put an end to the violence he proposes to set off a civil war. Oh, no doubt he doesn't think of it that way, but that is because he is projecting his spinelessness and lack of principles onto gun owners. He starts out by bringing up the three school shootings in the past month, provides the obligatory Columbine bloody shirt wave before dancing in the blood of the Gabriel Giffords shooting and finishes with the father who shot his daughter's laptop. He then drags out firearm murder comparisons (not...

Madison Mayor Dave Cieslewicz today announced an agreement with the AFSCME union representing city workers ahead of the implementation of the governor's budget repair bill provisions restricting collective bargaining. The deal announced with AFSCME Local 60 would require a 50 percent contribution to members' pensions and decrease a proposed pay increase at the end of the year from 3 percent to 2 percent. The agreement also extends the contract for an additional 15 months, which would allow the union and city to work together through 2013, and comes with the mayor's assurance that he'll "do everything we can to avoid...

Mayor Dave Cieslewicz (D, WI) is taking heat for what critics say were misleading claims about how strongly Madison's economy has grown since he took office in 2003. The Common Sense Coalition, a year-old policy group that so far has not backed any candidates for office, said that it was "disappointed, but not surprised."Cieslewicz's overstatement of the job statistics was reported in the Wisconsin State Journal on Friday. "Jobs are moving out of the city to the surrounding areas," Common Sense Coalition spokesman Ray Allen said. "It just seems that some of our local elected officials are not hearing the...