protests

In the increasingly strange world of daily newspaper journalism, where editors and publishers serve on local chambers of commerce and pen right-wing blogs while dissing their staffs for signing recall petitions, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel is setting the standard for strangeness.

The recall petition flap didn't affect the Journal Sentinel as it did a half dozen other newspapers around the state. Moreover, the J-S has won several Pulitzer Prizes in recent years for feature and investigative reporting. However, the Milwaukee newspaper's editorial page has veered sharply rightward politically in recent years. And the news department doesn't, in some respects, seem very far behind.

We're thinking mainly of the Journal Sentinel's can't-see-the-forest-for-the-trees feature called Politifact, which rates politician statements as shades of true or false, but which too often chooses to inspect rather unimportant snippets of rhetorical navel lint. At some point soon, should this trend continue, the column will rule on whether it was accurate for some public official to call Wisconsin "America's Dairyland."

Park off limitsBack when George W. Bush was running for president, protesters would regularly show up at his appearances, just as they do now whenever Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker goes out to raise more millions for his campaign or talk smack about his excellent public record. But the Bushies, like some right-wing authoritarians before them, had a way of coping with this: They'd check IDs at the door of their events to sort out anyone who wasn't a known Bush supporter, and they would get the police to corral street protesters in far away,out of sight, fenced-in "free speech zones" -- as if free speech in this country was never universal, but only allowable within a very limited set of physical reservations. Hey, it's how earlier great white fathers dealt with native Americans.

Progressive blogger Amy Goodman at Truthdig makes a trenchant observation about the way the mainstream media sometimes cover right-wing versus left-wing events. The "nut" graph:

If 2,000 Tea Party activists descended on Wall Street, you would probably have an equal number of reporters there covering them. Yet 2,000 people did occupy Wall Street on Saturday. They weren't carrying the banner of the tea party, the Gadsden flag with its coiled snake and the threat 'Don't Tread on Me.' Yet their message was clear: 'We are the 99 percent that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1 percent."

CapitolBesides the fact that original fears of damage were vastly overhyped, there's one other problem no one has really mentioned: It wasn't just the protesters who put up signs at the Capitol. All the protest messages are gone, and preservationists have since said that for the most part they were carefully affixed and removed, leaving no marks. Yet, some of the government's own architecturally questionable signs are still taped to wooden doors and marble columns throughout the mostly pristine building. PHOTOGRAPHIC PROOF, BELOW THE FOLD; HIT "READ MORE" 

There will be a panel Thursday May 11 at 5 PM at Union South in Madison.  The panel is organized by the New Organizing Institute, and will discuss the occupation of the capitol and the role of New Media in organizing the protests.

The panel will feature some of your favorite Wisconsin folks, including Emily Mills, Peter Rickmann, Melissa Ryan, Capper, and more.  For those of you not in Madison, it will live stream here (click on read more).

Scott FitzgeraldPresident Obama and public employee unions made death threats against Wisconsin Republicans who voted for Gov. Walker's union-busting law. So says GOP Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald.

Startling, but no misprint: In a March 22 fund-raising letter. Fitzgerald specifically claims that. Right in black and white. In a letter mailed to, presumably, hundreds or thousands of voters. 

Directly after referring in the letter to public employee unions and "Obama's political machine," Fitzgerald writes: "They even picketed my home to intimidate and scare my family, They even made death threats against those of us who stood up to their political clout." 

We will follow you, follow you wherever you may go,
There's no Great Lake that's too deep,
Rib Mountain's not too high it can keep,
keep us away from you
(--with apologies to Rick Nelson)

It's getting so Gov. Scotty can't go anywhere without large, informal "welcoming" committees of anti-Walker forces demonstrating visibly. The latest episode was reported in the Duluth News Tribune after a Walker sortie to Washburn in Bayfield County to a Wisconsin GOP fundraising dinner last Saturday. The newspaper led its story with news that "embattled Gov. Scott Walker spoke at an invitation-only event and was greeted by at least 2,000 angry protesters outside." The story continues, in part: