Governors: Hold budget debate advantage

		Eye on the  Capitol  John Huebscher

It is spring of an odd-numbered year. That means the debate over the state budget is holding center stage in the State Capitol and will do so until mid-summer. In that debate Governor Jim Doyle, like all governors before him, holds a strong "home court advantage."

The budget is the governor's responsibility in his capacity as head of the executive branch of state government. The governor defines the terms of the debate by his budget choices and priorities. This applies both to which programs to fund and how to raise the revenues to fund them.

The governor, like any executive, also enjoys the "bully pulpit." From his perch in the state's most visible political office he can command front-page news for his speeches. His staff and cabinet secretaries can hit the road to sell the budget decisions to civic groups and newsrooms across Wisconsin.

The legislature can only react. And it is nearly impossible for all 132 legislators or even only those in the other party to agree on a single alternative budget.

The governor is also able to force the legislature to play the Grinch to his Santa Claus. This is especially the case when it comes to paying for the services government provides.

Great balancing act

As noted in this column before, most of the decisions around taxing and spending touch five major policy areas: elementary and secondary schools, medical assistance, higher education, prisons, and aids to local government that serve to offset property taxes. Cutting these programs is never popular. Finding the money to pay for them - without raising taxes - is a challenge every governor tries to meet.

Governor Doyle, like other governors, has turned to "sin taxes" and fees to balance his budget. He is proposing a higher tax on cigarettes, a tax on hospitals, higher fees for auto registration, and other such assessments to generate about $1.7 billion in revenues.

Each of these ideas has its critics, but each of them avoids painful budget cuts. Those who don't like the cigarette tax or the tax on hospitals must find a way to pay for medical assistance for the poor, for children in needy families, and for others who lack health insurance.

Those who don't like the other fee increases must decide either to tap other revenue sources such as raising tuition for UW students, or to cut existing services, closing campuses, or reducing school aids, a move that often leads to higher property taxes. Opposing the governor's modification of "truth in sentencing" means finding the money to keep more offenders in prison.

Unattractive options

None of these alternatives is especially palatable. So, the option of going along with the governor's recommendations and letting him take the heat for his choices becomes more attractive as the budget season wears on.

Legislators also know that even when they win, they may still lose. They know that the governor, armed with the nation's most potent veto power, will modify or undo many of their successful efforts to change the budget.

So while a number of the governor's ideas will be rejected or modified, at the end of the day the legislature's budget will give him the lion's share of what he requested. The budget process will end, as it began, with the governor holding the upper hand.

And that is one reason why a good number of legislators would love to be governor some day.

John Huebscher is executive director of the Wisconsin Catholic Conference in Madison.

Safeguarding children:
Against Internet crimes

		Diocese of Madison  Office of Safe Environment  Rachael Miller Crigler

The Office of Safe Environment is committed to helping the Catholic faithful throughout the diocese recognize the importance of respecting and valuing the dignity of the human person.

Part of the diocesan efforts to accomplish this mission has been centered on continual education and training on measures to prevent abuse of children and vulnerable persons.

Throughout 2007, the Office of Safe Environment plans to provide increased assistance to diocesan parishes and schools with the implementation of practical safety procedures and further instruction in the theological foundations for safe environment training and practices.

Increased Internet use

One expanded area of focus in this process will be establishing guidelines and monitoring suggestions for youth in regards to Internet usage.

Forty-five percent of children in the U.S. now have access to the World Wide Web, making youth as a whole more susceptible to a myriad of abuse (such as harassment, pornography, exploitation, and abduction).

According to a 2006 study conducted by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, teen-aged children "have established significant presence on social networking web pages: 61 percent of 13- to 17-year-olds have a personal profile on a site such as MySpace, Friendster, or Xanga."

In addition, children appear to be lured into a false sense of security with those whom they encounter over the Internet; about 14 percent of teens "have actually met a person face-to-face that they have only spoken to over the Internet."

Safeguarding children

The Office of Safe Environment recognizes that as pastors, educators, and parents within the diocese, each member within the community bears a greater responsibility to protect the children and vulnerable adults in our midst against potential victimization online.

The first step in safeguarding against Internet crimes is to recognize the characteristics which may facilitate the conditions for an "un-safe" environment.

Sexual predators attempt to build relationships and emotional dependence with the child whom he/she is targeting. Children can also be the perpetrators in crimes against other children through the means of manipulation and social intimidation (i.e.: bullying).

Consequently, parish and school staff - along with parents and guardians - needs to be aware of how much personal information children could have posted about themselves on-line.

Additional measures

The Office of Safe Environment also recommends not including names with pictures on parish or school Web sites.

As a community, it is important to avoid allowing strangers access to information which would later allow a possible predator to approach a child by name or be able to track down a home phone number or address.

Photos published in local newspaper articles should also not directly correlate the name with students identified in the pictures.

Central to living out the Catholic faith is the necessity to protect the internal beauty of the soul by honoring the physical essence of the human body.

Therefore, it is imperative that all employees, volunteers, and parishioners within the diocese continue to work together to offer and maintain a safe environment for all.

Rachael Miller Crigler is the assistant to the Office of Safe Environment. Individuals can contact the Office of Safe Environment for the Diocese of Madison at P.O. Box 44983, Madison, WI 53744-4983, or by calling 608-821-3133.

Modern martyrs:
Walk the way of the cross with us

		The Catholic  Difference  George Weigel

Last September, on a lovely afternoon during what Poles call "Golden September," a friend took my wife and me to Jamna, in the forests of southern Poland between the Beskidy Mountains and Cracow.

You won't find Jamna on many maps - it's that small. Despite its obscurity, though, Jamna is indelibly imprinted on the spiritual map of the 20th century.

Villagers murdered

The men of Jamna were active in the Polish anti-Nazi resistance during World War II. On September 25, 1944, the Germans wreaked a terrible revenge.

While the men of the village were hiding in the woods so as not to endanger their wives and children, German troops rounded up the women, children, and old people of Jamna and murdered some 40 of them in cold blood, in and near their church.

One mother held up an icon of Our Lady, to shield the three children clutching her breast and her skirt; all were killed. The villagers' wooden huts were then burnt. Jamna, the Germans thought, was no more.

In memoriam

Fr. Jan Gora, a Polish Dominican, was determined that Jamna's sacrifice and the faith that sustained the villagers in their trial by fire not be forgotten.

With great persistence, he rebuilt the church in Jamna and surrounded it with a retreat-and-conference center; on a hill above the center is a two-story wooden hermitage for those who wish to make a silent retreat.

Near the original church, Father Gora erected starkly modern, locally carved wooden statues, one for each of the victims of Nazi barbarism: small statues for the children, bent statues for the elderly, the mother, and her three children together in memoriam, all where they fell.

Father Gora also commissioned a set of four panoramic paintings for the old church's interior: in the first, a local priest says Mass for the resistance fighters in the forest; in the second, bullets strike the icon-shield being held in front of the children; in a third, Pope John Paul II (who supported Father Gora's passion for Jamna), blesses a re-creation of the icon once shattered by bullets; in the fourth, Our Lady looks over the now-peaceful clearing in the forest where embodied evil once thought itself triumphant.

Priest tempted

I remembered my afternoon at Jamna recently while watching two films: The Ninth Day and Sophie Scholl: The Final Days.

The Ninth Day tells the true story of a priest from Luxembourg who is temporarily released from the horrors of the Dachau concentration camp and sent home on "leave" - so that the SS can tempt him to become a turncoat, who will pronounce Nazism and Catholicism compatible.

Cunningly enough, the moral and spiritual fulcrum of the film doesn't have so much to do with the priest's wily SS tempter (a former seminarian with a gift for argument), but with the priest's sense of his own imperfections and faults, which have been magnified under the brutal conditions of Dachau.

Necessary resistance

Sophie Scholl (which is distributed by Ignatius Press) is set in Munich in 1943, where the young students of the White Rose resistance movement are trying to alert their university colleagues to the catastrophe that the Nazis are bringing upon Germany. The scenes of the interrogation of 21-year-old Sophie Scholl offer some brilliant acting, based on the actual interrogation transcripts.

Even though one knows that this is going to end grimly, with Sophie and her friends beheaded after a mock trial, the moral drama of a young soul trying to wrestle with the demands of conscience in a world gone mad is nonetheless riveting.

The film is not without flaws: it underplays the Christian dimension of the White Rose resistance; Sophie's last cellmate is morphed from the evangelical Christian she was into a kindly German communist who avers that, "You have to believe in something."

But by the end, it is clear what Sophie Scholl believed in: the truth of God in Christ, which reveals the truth about human dignity - truths that made resistance to neo-pagan tyranny imperative.

Jamna, The Ninth Day, Sophie Scholl: three reminders of the modern martyrs who walk the way of the cross with us, this Lent and every Lent.

George Weigel is a senior fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.