2 million Wisconsin citizens demand Walker’s removal

Image courtesy of WKOW.com, Madison, WI.

John Nichols at the Nation tells the story of democracy at work in Wisconsin:

What does democracy look like? How about this: a governor, swept into office on the GOP wave of 2010 with a financial assist from the billionaire Koch brothers, pivots immediately from moderate talk about job creation to radical austerity that divides his state more than any in the Union. He attacks the collective bargaining rights of public workers and teachers. When hundreds of thousands of citizens rally to oppose his agenda, the governor and his allies respond by attempting to bar protests in the Capitol. They reject their state’s tradition of open and transparent government, dismiss criticisms from the opposition—even from moderates in their own party—and begin gerrymandering districts and changing election rules, actions Common Cause and the League of Women Voters recognize as assaults on voting rights. Faced with a serious threat to basic rights and democracy, citizens organize a grassroots campaign to recall and remove the governor, the lieutenant governor, the State Senate majority leader and key legislators.

The task is daunting: it requires collecting more than a million signatures in the dead of winter, and it must overcome a multimillion-dollar attack campaign, along with daily condemnations from local, state and national talk-radio and the Fox News echo chamber. Yet in villages and inner-city neighborhoods, grandmothers with clipboards and high school seniors engaging for the first time in politics brave the snow and cold. They put up with catcalls from Rush Limbaugh listeners who have been instructed that they are nothing but “union stooges.” On the day the documents are due, the people march to the state elections office with brass bands, banners and petitions bearing almost
2 million names—the largest portion of a state’s population ever to demand the removal of a governor and his lieutenants.

Read more:

When Koch brothers proxies in the Wisc. legislature go after a professor’s emails

Professor Juan Cole at Informed Comment offers an in-depth look at the American right-wing’s latest attempt to stifle academic freedom in leading universities. Cole, a history professor at the Univ. of Mich. writes:

The latest McCarthyite tactics of the American Right Wing is to attempt to intimidate professors at public universities by launching Freedom of Information Requests for their emails, as part of a witch hunt for dreaded Liberal Opinions.

First, the proxies for the Koch brothers in the Wisconsin legislature went after the emails of prominent University of Wisconsin professor William Cronon (the incoming head of the American Historical Association). The reasoning here is that state laws typically prohibit the use of state resources for partisan political activity, and those states with open meeting laws want to make sure that state resources are not used for political plotting in smoke-filled rooms.

Then, as Rachel Maddow explains below, a Koch-brothers-funded think tank in Michigan requested the emails of professors in this state, including the University of Michigan, including those that mention Maddow’s name. 

  Read Cole’s complete post here.

It’s a great fight song: “On Wisconsin, On Wisconsin…”

Feb. 26, Madison rally of 70-100,000 demonstrators, tennisforum.com

I’m not from the Badger State, but when I played the snare drum in my high school band back in Ohio years ago, “On Wisconsin” was one of our favorite marching tunes. I just looked up the lyrics and was reminded that it’s a great fight song.

And those Wisconsin folks are not giving up the fight these days against their over-reaching amateur governor, Scott Walker; just today, they held their biggest rally yet with a turn out of more than 70,000.

The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank nailed Walker today in his op-ed titled Scott Walker’s Unprincipled Rigidity.

Milbank writes: 

"He's not one of us."

That phrase, uttered in the fourth minute of what Scott Walker believed to be a private phone conversation, tells you everything you need to know about the rookie governor of Wisconsin.

Walker thought he was talking to a patron, conservative billionaire David Koch, but thanks to the amateurish management that seems to be a hallmark of his governorship, he was instead being punked by an impostor from a liberal Web site.

In the recorded call, Walker praised a centrist state senator, Tim Cullen, as "about the only reasonable one" among the 14 Democratic legislators who fled the state to deny Walker the quorum he needs to destroy Wisconsin's public-sector unions. But when the fake Koch offered to call Cullen, Walker discouraged him: "He's pretty reasonable, but he's not one of us. . . . He's not there for political reasons. He's just trying to get something done. . . . He's not a conservative. He's just a pragmatist."

Read more: