Madison Is Sixth "Smartest" College Town

This ranking is per the Daily Beast. Ranking does not mean much in itself but large academic-research centers are hotbeds of progressive movements that brought down the national GOP, what John Judis and Ruy Teixeira call the Ideopolis—enemy of bigotry, Palinesque ignorance and neo-McCarthyite politics of "terror" propaganda.

As the second largest city and capital of Wisconsin, Madison is the center of academia in a state once known for the strength of its lumber industry. The university and the government are the city’s biggest employers. The town supports a strong cultural scene, which includes a local repertory theater, opera, ballet, and symphony. The university is a leading venue for stem-cell research, since UW-Madison Professor James Thompson first isolated human embryonic cells in 1998, generating more than $800 million for research in 2008.

Dershowitz on Innocent Man Case

Scalia's Catholic Betrayal
by Alan M. Dershowitz

I never thought I would live to see the day when a justice of the Supreme Court would publish the following words:

This court has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who has had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is ‘actually’ innocent. Quite to the contrary, we have repeatedly left that question unresolved, while expressing considerable doubt that any claim based on alleged ‘actual innocence’ is constitutionally cognizable.

Yet these words appeared in a dissenting opinion issued by Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas on Monday. Let us be clear precisely what this means. If a defendant were convicted, after a constitutionally unflawed trial, of murdering his wife, and then came to the Supreme Court with his very much alive wife at his side, and sought a new trial based on newly discovered evidence (namely that his wife was alive), these two justices would tell him, in effect: ‘Look, your wife may be alive as a matter of fact, but as a matter of constitutional law, she’s dead, and as for you, Mr. Innocent Defendant, you’re dead, too, since there is no constitutional right not to be executed merely because you’re innocent.’ ...