By Bill Lueders
Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism
One day last October, Sgt. Louise Hackel of the Clark County Sheriff’s Department was summoned to deal with an emergency.
A distraught woman at the central Wisconsin county’s Community Services office was being involuntarily committed for mental health reasons. Hackel, one of four jail workers who arrived on the scene, [...]

A Dane County judge who struck down parts of the state’s law gutting collective bargaining for some public workers has drawn a spate of letters and phone messages expressing outrage.

When it comes to thinking and writing and money and politics, the public and press often take too simplistic a view.

By Bill Lueders
Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism
Gov. Scott Walker’s decision to drop “the bomb” in February 2011 is continuing to prove lucrative for one party: The private law firm hired by the governor to deal with the fallout.
That arrangement is now worth up to $850,000 in taxpayer dollars for Michael Best & Friedrich, hired [...]

You don’t have to be a campaign donor or corporate executive to get an audience with Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker. But it doesn’t hurt. The third installment in a three-part series.

Walker’s official calendars from his first 13 months in office chronicle these and scores more hours he spent building credentials with conservatives in Wisconsin and across the nation. The second installment in a three-part series.

Last year, Gov. Scott Walker crisscrossed the nation, breaking fundraising records and netting about half his donations from out of state. But his calendars show the consequences of fame and fundraising. The first in a three-part series.

The Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council is bestowing its annual “Opee” Awards for openness in government. And Wisconsin state lawmakers have been tapped for both kinds of awards — good as well as bad.