Public Accountability
The re-inventing government item last year will transform into holding elected officials accountable for their true and false statements in this election year. School board, city and county board elections will be held statewide this spring. There will be a U.S. Senate race this fall as U.S. Sen. Herb Kohl's six-year term reaches its end.
Local city and county officials who aren't elected but have responsibility to the public need to be held accountable for their actions or omissions. City, county and school board people will continue to receive watchdog-like scrutiny of their most prominent action, their annual budget for the next year.
Cultural Connections
A growing influence of women in society necessitates more emphasis on issues that affect them. Diversity issues continue to have importance as the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh increases its minority enrollment and Hispanics find the area a desirable place to live. Culture issues illustrated by Amish-English tensions in Green Lake County and assimilation in years ahead of new Hmong immigrants into our neighborhoods require a continued focus on these issues.
I look forward to taking part in this discussion.
1 comment:
My issue is this... Since when did The Northwestern or any newspaper for that matter become a politician? Their job is to report the news, not have an agenda in covering it. The Northwestern editorial board, while right on the money in some of their commentary and way off on others, has this extremely irresponsible idea of self-importance that they are the premier voices of the city. Somehow they feel they are the only middle ground, the only voices of reason in a sea of partisan hacks.
The problem I have is that on certain issues they take sides very easily and are not very objective and in fact it is the responsibility of a publisher of the news to act as an independent source that allows all citizens to make their own mind up on issues.
The fact that the editorial board has it's own agenda for the city proves the delusion they are under that they are supposed to act as difference makers rather than dissemenators of information who occasionally adds a personal commentary or two on an issue with a great amount of notice that the very same comments are in fact the opinion of that editor personally and not the paper as a whole.
The Northwestern never follows this line and for some reason the editorial board believes itself to be more important than it is. A city council of it's own if you will to somehow battle what they collectively feel are the ills of our city.
That bothers me. If they want to have their own agenda they should a) run for office or b) create their own ideological publication which doesn't pretend to be a third party independent observer of the news when they're trying too hard to make the news.
Oh and before I close, why didn't you post the interesting 1/1/06 Sunday headline article Doug Zellmer wrote up about the war? That to me had more meat in it about the city's pulse on the war and I got a pretty solid quote in there....
http://thenorthwestern.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060101/OSH0101/601010352/1128/OSHnews
Rp
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