If Mayor Tom Barrett had been at City Hall on Wednesday afternoon, he would have gotten an earful. A crowd organized by the working women’s organization 9to5 gathered to call out the mayor for his opposition to the paid sick days referendum, which passed with almost 70% of the vote in November 2008. The kids in the crowd delivered boxes of let...

The Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce succeeded—for now—in thwarting the will of 69% of Milwaukee’s voters today, when a Milwaukee County circuit court judge ruled that the voter-approved paid sick days ordinance is unconstitutional. Although MMAC admitted that the majority of its members provide paid sick days to their employees, the conservative business group ...

The headlines say that a circuit court judge has struck down Milwaukee’s paid sick days ordinance because it was unconstitutional. But the actual decision written by Judge Thomas Cooper tells a much different, more nuanced story. Judge Cooper found that a small portion of the ordinance...

Issue: The Paid Sick Days coalition, led by the working women’s group 9to5 Milwaukee, collected more than 42,000 signatures in support of a referendum that will likely be placed on the Nov. 4 ballot. Jerk: On July 16, the conservative syndicated host said this about autistic children: “In 99% of the cases, it’s a brat who hasn’t been told to cut the act out. That’s what autism is. What do you mean they scream and they’re silent? They don’t have a father around to tell them, ‘Don’t act like a moron. You’ll get nowhere in life. Stop acting like a putz. Straighten up. Act like a man. Don’t sit there crying and screaming, idiot.’”

The rush to apply for food benefits this week shone a spotlight on the growing food crisis in Milwaukee. Troubled by flooding, high fuel costs and rising food prices that are stretching family budgets, an estimated 3,000 Milwaukeeans thought they had found relief at Marcia P. Coggs Human Services Center...