Some states allow the major parties to prevent candidates from appearing on the ballot under their name.

Christmas and Hanukkah have come and gone, and a new year is here. As we enter 2018, many people are preparing new goals to meet and new priorities to focus on. We, as state legislators, would be well served to follow suit.

Is Arizona now the progressive state Wisconsin once was?

The speaker has promised entitlement reform since he first won his House seat. If he retires soon as reports suggest, he has just a year to deliver.

In this penny-wise and pound-foolish political environment of the past several decades, we managed to put things off to future generations.

Gov. Pothole has allowed Wisconsin’s roads to decay to 2nd-worst in the country, costing motorists repair penalties reaching an estimated $700 annually in the Milwaukee area, data show.

Washington overflows with people seeking power, status and wealth. They want to impress. However, Marc Raskin was impressive because he came to D.C. to make the world a better place.

The former Kennedy aide, whose radical democratic faith defined progressive activism and ideas across six decades, has died at 83.

Russia extensively meddled to influence our political and social views, shown through thousands of social media/internet posts, many paid for in Rubles. This tactic is illegal, a modern attack on our nation, and the political hacks who aided and abetted this effort are also guilty of a crime.

Dennis Degenhardt could win GOP-leaning Assembly seat as a pro-business moderate.

I was paging through Peter Baker’s “Obama: The Call of History” Christmas Day and realized again just how much I miss this man in the White House. If nothing else, he made us proud, unlike the childish and insulting person that occupies it today.

Ron Chernow’s biography of U.S. Grant gives him the usual credit for his generous peace terms given at Appomattox, terms intended to heal the nation. But far fewer books recount the Reconstruction Period that followed.

As 2017 draws to a close, thank you to all our faculty, staff, students and supporters who make UW-Madison a world-class institution. I look forward to an even better year in 2018!

Walker now cites creating or retaining – – new category – – nearly – – new qualifier – – 30,000 jobs in 2017.

A contribution is almost never a crime; a politician’s actions in response to that contribution can be.

We should all be concerned by the precedent that shrinking Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments sets. What will happen if next the Trump administration decides, without our input, to shrink the Upper Mississippi River National Wildlife Refuge? The consequences that would have on Wisconsin’s environment and the economy would be disastrous.

Since 2010, Illinois has lost a net 650,000 residents to other states.

Donald Trump’s Federal Communications Commission voted in mid-December to eliminate “the First Amendment of the internet,” and in so doing it delivered the most brutal blow of 2017 to democracy in America.

It another good year for Cheap Shots, Isthmus’ annual tradition of delivering low blows to worthy recipients. Let’s get to it.