Paul Fanlund

1 week ago | captimes.com | Paul Fanlund

Andre Perry, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and an expert on race in America, believes the state of African Americans in any community can best be measured by the life expectancy of Black people living there. By that measure, Madison is below average. Black people in the city have a shorter average life expectancy than the national average — 72.6 years versus 74.9 years nationally. That is according to the “Black Progress Index,” a sophisticated Brookings database available online.

2 weeks ago | captimes.com | Paul Fanlund

Ben Wikler’s recent announcement that he’s stepping down as Wisconsin’s Democratic leader generated a volume of national coverage I’ve never seen for the head of a state party. A New York Magazine interview was typical in its admiring tone. Since he got the job in 2019, Wikler has “molded the organization into the gold standard” among state parties, the article said. After Wikler’s announcement, he spent some time vacationing with his family and renovating his Madison home.

3 weeks ago | captimes.com | Paul Fanlund

In the days after Donald Trump won in November, columnists assessed the coming carnage and made resolutions. The next-day thoughts of Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times were headlined: “My Manifesto for Despairing Democrats.”Kristof walked through his 14 prescriptions, impressive in bulk and insight. My favorite Kristof point might displease the “we-should-always-go-further left” crowd.

1 month ago | captimes.com | Paul Fanlund

Shortly after being inaugurated as president in 2017, Donald Trump crossed 15th Street from the White House to tour the National Museum of African American History and Culture. “This is a truly great museum,” Trump said then, calling it the “Black Smithsonian.”“I’ve learned, and I’ve seen, and they’ve done an incredible job. What they’ve done here is something that probably cannot be duplicated. … It was done with tremendous love and passion and that’s why it’s so great.”That was then, of course.

1 month ago | captimes.com | Paul Fanlund

My first reaction to Susan Crawford’s resounding Wisconsin Supreme Court victory excluded Elon Musk, which made me an outlier given my reading of mainstream and social media. My thoughts instead went to how her election marks a last step in moving Wisconsin beyond 15 years or more in which Republicans have dominated the statehouse, even when they lacked the public’s support in our famously 50-50 state.