As you might expect, some folks aren't happy with this news

Taxpayers start subsidizing golf courses. (Janesville Gazette, 1/23/2012)

Excerpt: For the first time since the mid-1980s, Janesville taxpayers are subsidizing the city's two golf courses. In 2011, the subsidy was about $115,000. 

That doesn't include $200,000 that the city borrowed for capital expenses. 

In 2012, taxpayers will contribute about $1.60 for every golfer who tees off at Riverside or Blackhawk, the city's two public courses.

Danah Boyd: "The first anthropologist...from the tribe she's studying"

Cracking Teenagers' Online Codes.  (The New York Times, 1/20/2012)

Excerpt:  But as Dr. Boyd sees it, adults are worrying about the wrong things.

Children today, she said, are reacting online largely to social changes that have taken place off line.

“Children’s ability to roam has basically been destroyed,” Dr. Boyd said in her office at Microsoft, where a view of the Boston skyline is echoed in the towers of books on her shelves, desk and floor. “Letting your child out to bike around the neighborhood is seen as terrifying now, even though by all measures, life is safer for kids today.”

Children naturally congregate on social media sites for the relatively unsupervised conversations, flirtations, immature humor and social exchanges that are the normal stuff of teenage hanging-out, she said.

“We need to give kids the freedom to explore and experience things online that might actually help them,” she added. “What scares me is that we don’t want to look at the things that make us uncomfortable. So rather than see what teenagers are showing us online about bullying and suicide and the problems they’re dealing with and using that information to help them, we’re making ourselves blind to it."

Knee Deep? I think we need to go higher up the anatomy

Michael Best & Friedrich's involvement covers

• Collective bargaining
• Redistricting
• Mining
• Recalls
• Recounts
• John Doe
• Ethics charges

"The shadow DOJ": Law firm knee deep in state's many hot-button issues. (Wisconsin State Journal, 1/22/2012)

LINK

Excerpt:   Lester Pines, a prominent liberal-leaning attorney with Cullen Weston Pines & Bach, which has handled dozens of political cases, said Michael Best & Friedrich owes at least part of its GOP workload to its specialized skill set.

Founded in 1848, the firm employs more than 220 attorneys and can count among its numbers a former counsel to the governor, two former deputy attorneys general and two former assistant attorneys general.

"There are just not a lot of firms that can do what they do," Pines said.