"Barack Obama’s decision to base his re-election campaign outside of Washington seems to be working pretty darn well."

"The campaign’s massive, high-rise headquarters in Chicago’s Loop achieves a fine balance between 2008’s hip-casual dorm room (there’s a Ping-Pong table and cheeky homemade signage) and 2012’s systematized Death Star (there are more employees than I have ever seen in a political campaign, with work stations subdivided as ever more employees are added). The place hums from early morning until late at night, designed for maximum efficiency and manifest focus."

This, in Time Magazine, by Mark Halperin, is a particularly silly example of press love for Obama.

Hip-casual dorm room... cheeky homemade signage... systematized Death Star... so embarrassing. Halperin sounds like the new, overeager intern.

"Are public union labor leaders trying to save Scott Walker?"

Paul Fanlund, editor of Madison's venerable (and very liberal) Capital Times, says that many Democrats are asking that question. These Democrats are the Democrats who support Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett in the recall primary, who don't like the way his Democratic adversary Kathleen Falk is beating up on him, portraying him as insufficiently union-friendly. Barrett's angle is he's more likely to win, and if Walker is the enemy, then ixnay on Barrett criticism.

It's amusingly similar to the Republican primaries, where some people love Santorum because he's more hardcore, and others want Romney, because you've got to win over the moderates, and they really don't much like the hardcore of your party.

Fanlund seems to spend a lot of time listening to Democratic State Senator Sen. Jon Erpenbach, who has decided to support Barrett:

While loath to criticize Falk... Erpenbach’s decision certainly implies he thinks someone not from Dane County would run strongest statewide: “For me personally, the goal is to get him (Walker) out of office before he does any more damage.”

Erpenbach says he has spoken with hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people across the state and collective bargaining is only one of many issues on voters’ minds....

Erpenbach aside, my interviews with other Democrats elicit phrases like “labor leaders are blowing it” and are “being selfish.” One says, “What we don’t need is a circular firing squad” during the next month....

Ha ha. This is just like the way the Republican establishment tries to shush the Tea Party. After all the hard ground work is done by a passionate, ideologically committed group, the party insiders move in to claim a valuable political foothold that they never would have fought for personally, and the theory is they're doing everyone a favor because the protest kids just don't look right in mainstream politics.

Kathleen Falk is getting Christine O'Donnelled! She's getting Sharron Angled!

The fake-but-accurate story — smearing Paul Ryan and Ron Johnson — that appeared in Madison's Cap Times last Saturday.

The Cap Times reveals that it published, then took down a story that "falsely said that U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan and U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson were joining state Rep. Steve Nass, R-town of La Grange, in pressuring the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History to purge its archives of posters from last year’s protests at the Capitol in Madison."

The story was based on a news release that purportedly came from Nass’ office, but was in fact fabricated by Madison labor cartoonist Mike Konopacki [who] sent the fake release to a staff member who then forwarded it to Associate Editor John Nichols, who wrote the story.

The release seemed plausible because on Wednesday, The Capital Times reported that the University of Wisconsin-Extension’s School for Workers abruptly called off an event called “Art in Protest” connected to the Capitol protests after a Nass aide told its organizers that it would be in poor taste. The organizers said publicly that they called off “Art in Protest” for a “variety of reasons” and that “now is not the best time” for it, but the story paraphrased two informed sources anonymously saying that Nass’ office threatened the school’s funding.

Konopacki helped organize the canceled event, and in that story, he was quoted as saying: “I understand why the School for Workers had to make this move. They're in survival mode. But I'm outraged. This is an attack on freedom of speech and freedom of expression, and is an attack on academic freedom.”

Nichols wrote a short story based on the fake release and made follow-up calls to flesh out the story, but began to have doubts when he discovered that other sources had not heard about the release.

Questioned about the release, Konopacki revealed that he created it using Photoshop. He said he intended it as a prank (in an initial email he said he “wanted to point out the hypocrisy between allowing Wisconsin protest art in the Smithsonian but not at the Pyle Center” where “Art in Protest” would have taken place), but is apologetic about the confusion it created.

The Cap Times took the embarrassing and libelous story down after 40 minutes.

By the way, John Nichols has a new book: "Uprising: How Wisconsin Renewed the Politics of Protest, from Madison to Wall Street." Meade and I have been reading it.

ADDED: In his book, Nichols is highly critical of the media for getting the story of the Wisconsin protests wrong. Excerpt:

While it was easy to laugh at Fox, it was harder to comprehend the coverage of events in Wisconsin by the New York Times. The Times can and does produce terrific reporting on a variety of fronts. In many senses, it remains the last bastion of old-school “newspaper of record” seriousness in a media landscape that is littered with the carcasses of once-great news-rooms, thus making it more important—and influential—in today’s news landscape than ever before in its history. The Times even has something that’s lacking at virtually every other print, broadcast, or digital news outlet in America today: a solid labor writer in the person of Steven Greenhouse. Unfortunately, he was not dispatched to Wisconsin to cover the story. The Times reporters who did come to Wisconsin brought with them some of major media’s worst misconceptions and biases with regard to unions and working-class people. And in so doing they became a part of the story, reinforcing Governor Walker’s intransigence.

Walker is a media junkie.... he reads, listens to, and watches media with an eye for how different outlets are interpreting and reacting to stories....

The Times... blew an even bigger piece of the Wisconsin story several weeks later. When Republican legislators used backroom maneuvers to pass Walker’s bill, the Times reported that the fight was “over.” But the editors in New York forgot to tell the people of Wisconsin....

The hundreds of thousands of Wisconsinites who rallied at their capitol and in communities across the state said by their very presence that they were no longer going to accept the official “line” from old-media outlets that failed them—and new media outlets that simply compounded the sins of the fathers by aggregating and amplifying the folly of media outlets that have replaced reporting with stenography to power. What dawned on Wisconsinites and their allies in other states was that the problem was not simply the overt bias of a Limbaugh or an O’Reilly but the overt ignorance of media outlets that imagined Americans no longer approved of organized labor—and would never ever stand in solidarity with a trade-union movement that was arguing for public services, public utilities, and public schools.

When media outlets got around to conducting polls on the issues that arose in the Wisconsin struggle, they found that, to paraphrase the old Firesign Theatre routine, everything they “knew” was wrong. A CBS News/New York Times survey, conducted shortly after Wisconsin exploded, revealed that six in ten Americans opposed the elimination of collective bargaining rights for public sector union workers, while 56 percent were opposed to the cutting of pay or benefits to reduce state budget deficits. The USA Today/Gallup survey released two weeks after Governor Walker made his proposal indicated that 61 percent of Americans were opposed to legislation that would take away the collective bargaining rights of unionized government workers. Only one in three of those surveyed backed any move to undermine protections for labor.

... Many was the day when an absurdly ill-conceived or simply inaccurate report on the front page of the Walker-supporting Wisconsin State Journal newspaper had been deconstructed by Sly and his guests before Madisonians had trudged out their front doors to find the offending publication in the snowbank where it had landed.

The Capitol Times — "Your Progressive Voice" — in Madison, Wisconsin, put up a poll about the Scott Walker recall.

See? It's over in the sidebar. Keep in mind that the Cap Times is not only based in Madison. It proudly skews to the left and, consequently, attracts an unusually liberal readership. So check out the results:



It's possible that some pro-Walker site has already linked to this poll, and that's why Walker is getting 54% of the vote. (I assume my linking now will have an effect.) But it's startling to see the Cap Timesters going big for Walker like this.

In second place, with 33%, is Russ Feingold, but Russ Feingold has assured us he's not running. I have — at various times — predicted he'll "reluctantly" jump in after playing coy, but I don't think he'll do it unless he feels pretty confident he will win... not just the primary, but win against Walker. And I don't think he's going to get that feeling.

Madisonians — including Police Chief Noble Wray — fret about the new concealed carry law in action.

Our local liberal rag, the Cap Times, displays and magnifies the worrying for its skittish readers.

What really trips Wray's trigger is the lack of a meaningful training requirement. Republican Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen prepared rules requiring four hours of training courses, but fellow Republicans thought even that low bar overly onerous and GOP Gov. Scott Walker agreed. Says Wray, "I thought four hours was a bare minimum," adding that almost all state law enforcement officials agree.

What exactly do you do for 4 hours? It seems as though the point of making it 4 hours was to deter people from exercising their rights. That is, it wasn't really to serve the state's legitimate interest in safety, but for the purpose or effect of placing a substantial obstacle in the path of the citizen who chooses to carry a gun. (Do you recognize the italicized words? Google them if you don't, especially if you enjoy irony, the exposure of hypocrisy, and fun stuff like that.)

Madison's concealed gun crowd has to be minuscule, I'd guess. After all, it's hard for me to imagine the biomolecular chemistry professor or the pediatric oncologist yearning to tote a concealed sidearm. So how many are seeking permits in Madison?

I love the smug elitism. Madison people are all professors and doctors. Not even just run-of-the-mill professors and doctors. We're a steaming mass of biomolecular chemistry professors and pediatric oncologists. It's those lowlifes from beyond the gleaming city's limits who want guns. Ugh! These benighted folk want to cling to some guns along with their religion. They don't belong here, just like that fiend Scott Walker and all the Republicans in the legislature don't belong here. They are bringing their what's-the-matter-with-Wisconsin values to our beautiful city!

The author of the Cap Times piece — Paul Fanlund — tries to find out how many Madisonians there are among the the 67,000 who have applied for permits and is surprised to learn that it's illegal to disclose that information. Law-abiding gun owners actually have privacy interests the state wants to protect. What a surprise! But it would be so interesting to know what loathsome, Republican-voting communities they came from. Surely not the teeming-with-physicists-and-oncologists Madison!

Fanlund quotes Chief Wray:

"What I can't understand is how come we have not evolved beyond the point that the best way to protect ourselves is a gun? How come we cannot come up with something that is less destructive and less permanent."

I don't know, Chief. I'm pretty evolved myself, being a Madisonian professor, but I don't know. I do have a question for you though: Why haven't the police — the police you lead — eliminated crime in our neighborhoods? Why are there still rapes and robberies? Why are there still gangs? Why haven't your police evolved to the point where you have solved these problems for us? Because, I know that I, personally, would love to depend on government for all my personal protection. How come you cannot come up with something?

In Madison, Wisconsin, "the Occupy movement isn't resonating with people."

Todd Finkelmeyer observes ruefully, in Madison's pathetic newspaper, The Capital Times ("Your Progressive Voice"). He's found one UW student who is into the protest and who "has struggled to find fellow students willing to join him in making a visible and vocal protest on behalf of the youthful 99 percent."

By "the youthful 99 percent," I presume Finkelmeyer means the portion of the 99% that happens to be adult but not yet middle aged. I suppose, depending on how you define young, the percent might be something like 30%. But young people who find themselves at the lower end of the income scale have the least to gripe about. They're just starting out. The question is: Can they move up over the course of their careers? If they are students at a fine university, they ought to think they can or they're wasting their time. Whether making it in America today is easy or hard nowadays, these students are better off studying than protesting. I congratulate the students for their good sense in resisting the protest scene.

But Finkelmeyer chides them:

But in Madison, despite its reputation as a hotbed of student activism — notoriety that dates to the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the city served as an epicenter for those protesting the Vietnam War — college students are slow to jump on the Occupy bandwagon.

"From the very beginning of Occupy Madison, from the very first general assembly at Reynolds Park and in the following weeks, there was a noticeable lack of students," says [that one UW student], who in late October helped organize two Occupy UW marches as a member of the Direct Action Committee of Occupy Madison. He had hoped those would turn into weekly on-campus protests, but only 15 people showed up for the second march and no more were held due to a lack of interest.

"I don't think the outreach we did was as good as it could have been, so it didn't grow and Occupy UW has sort of been put on the back burner," says Phillips.

Maybe people don't want to be organized — by others, that is. Maybe the UW students are organized within their own lives and are pursuing an education and aiming toward a career path. Back in the not-so-good good old days of Vietnam protesting, you couldn't just concentrate on getting started on the path to economic well-being. The military draft was staring you in the face.

And, by the way, Finkelmeyer, mixed metaphor alert: "hotbed... epicenter...  bandwagon."

The article goes on and on, with lots of quotes from professors and other politicos who wonder why the students are resisting the pull of protests. The delightfully named Elizabeth Wrigley-Field — "a New York native who is pursuing her Ph.D. in sociology from UW-Madison" — "cautions" us not to "over-generalize" and say that the students are apathetic.

"I think part of the strength of the Occupy movement in most areas is that it's a novelty of sorts... But we already had that here with the occupation of the Capitol (in February and March) and then we had Walkerville...."

So maybe they're not apathetic; they're sick of all the protesting. Or they're passionate about their own individual lives and they need to study to get to a solid place for themselves in this risky economy. That tent-city out on East Washington Avenue is — by contrast — a horrifying alternative. It's irrational to think that hanging around in a parking lot with a bunch of left-wingers hoping for a revolution is going to work out better for you than concentrating on your school work and your job search.

IN THE COMMENTS: sean said:

Somewhat akin to what Prof. Althouse said, my back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that there are about 12 million Americans of college age, of whom perhaps 400,000 go to colleges of the caliber of Wisconsin or better. (The majority, of course, don't go to college at all, at least not to four-year institutions.) So Wisconsin students are in the top 3% of their age group, if not the top 1%, and obviously they aren't disposed to protest on behalf of other people.

And Patrick said:

I had the good fortune of being in Madison on Christmas eve day. As we drove down E. Wash, past the Occupy parking lot, it looked barren, save for some tents. I'd assumed that if they were still "occupying," they'd be up at the Capitol. What sort of impact could they possibly imagine having from that parking lot? "Occupy Parking Lot" just loses whatever zing those clowns ever had. Total failure. They need to "move on."

I responded: "It's the parking lot of what used to be a Don Miller car dealership, so we always call it 'Occupy Don Miller.'"

"Republican bigots and the candidates who encourage hate."

Another dishonest, embarrassing editorial in the venerable Madison rag known as the Capitol Times.

A clue to the clueless: One man booed, the surrounding audience tried to shush him, and the candidates on stage couldn't hear it.

"I believe an individual has the right to use force as a means of protecting themselves, their families, and their homes from aggressors."

So says Wisconsin recall candidate Kim Simac, as quoted in a Capital Times editorial titled "Unlike Simac, Holperin respects the whole Constitution." (Jim Holperin is the Democratic incumbent, representing the Northwoods, where a recall election will take place tomorrow.)

The quote is sound, and I'll bet a lot of people of the Northwoods love it, but the Cap Times is using it to leverage a whole theory that Simac only cares about the Second Amendment.

The pathetic Madison newspaper — does anyone in the Northwoods read it? — begins by joking that Simac is "apparently a graduate of the Sharron Angle School of Constitutional Scholarship" and reminds us that Angle — the Nevadan who tried to unseat Harry Reid in 2010 — once referred to using “Second Amendment solutions” to deal with the excesses of government.  Note, Simac didn't say "Second Amendment solutions." Her quote is about defending life and property from "aggressors," which would make most people think of criminals — attackers and home invaders. If "aggressors" makes you think of the government... you might want to think about joining the Tea Party yourself.

The Cap Times touts Holperin's "record of taking the whole Constitution seriously."

He has championed the right to speak, to assemble and to petition for the redress of grievances. 

Is there any evidence that Simac doesn't respect First Amendment rights? Of course, Holperin has a record: He's been the Northwoods senator for decades. But what has Simac ever done to deserve this smear?

He has worked to protect the right to privacy.

Now, that's a specific aspect of constitutional law that conservatives and liberals disagree on. But it has nothing to do with "the Sharron Angle School of Constitutional Scholarship" and whether one loves some clauses of the Constitution and ignores others. It has to do with how expansively one ought to interpret the Due Process Clause and whether one supports finding constitutional rights when there is no explicit constitutional text. That's a difficult area of constitutional law that is a perennial issue in American political debate. It has nothing to do with Sharron Angle, enthusiasm for gun rights, and the failure to respect the entire Constitution.

The Capital Times — I've said it before — is a rag. It should be ashamed of itself. As we say in Wisconsin: "Shame. Shame. Shame. Shame. Shame."

The final 2 Wisconsin recall elections may produce the state's first Tea Party state senator.

The Capitol Times reports:

Kim Simac, the founder of the Northwoods Patriots... is challenging [Democratic incumbent Jim] Holperin...

“It has been on our minds and in our plans for two years now to have someone from the tea party movement in the state Senate,” says Tim Dake, chair of Wisconsin GrandSons of Liberty, a Tea Party Patriots organization. “If she wins, it is going to be huge.”...

In addition to the new ads hitting radio and TV audiences Wednesday, Simac launched a six-day, 2,000-mile tour of the district that will take her through each of the 11 counties in Senate District 12.

“Our goal all along has been to meet as many people face to face as possible. The voters are the most important in this election,” Simac says on her campaign website. “It was the people in the 12th Senate District who were left without representation when Jim Holperin fled the state. I intend to go to every house I can to tell them personally I won’t abandon them when the times get tough.”

Simac will be driving around the 12th District in her green GMC truck with a campaign sign rigged to the back....

Here's an ad of hers from the end of July, in which, appearing in overalls, Simac makes a point of displaying her lack of wealth, apparently in response to a criticism from Holperin — which I haven't found on line and can't quite extrapolate. At the beginning of this ad, she says "Jim Holperin's campaign ads imply that any person who has a low income should be ashamed and should not run for public office."



Poking around on the internet, I think what she's talking about are ads against her that say she didn't pay taxes in various years, when she simply didn't have enough income to owe taxes. Here's her press release on the subject.

Here's a new article in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel with some information on both candidates. Holperin is a Democrat who, despite fleeing Madison with the other Democrats last winter, did in the end vote for the GOP's budget repair bill.

The Capitol Times ask Biddy Martin: "Do you have any regrets..."

"... about not letting UW System President Kevin Reilly and the Board of Regents know about the plan you and Gov. Walker were working on to award UW-Madison public authority status?"

Of course, she says no. There's a lot more to this interview, but you have to read between the lines, because Martin speaks in that diplomatic, bureaucratic way. But she sure did love the students. She's going to miss them and all the fun she had with them. And those protests at the Capitol? Not an obstacle. Of course not.

The local Madison newspaper can't handle the word "all."

Here is the Capital Times's editorial about the Wisconsin Supreme Court:

All of the defenders of Supreme Court Justice David Prosser would have Wisconsinites believe the man who had admitted to shouting obscenities at Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson before threatening to “destroy” her, and who now stands accused of trying to choke Justice Ann Walsh Bradley, is just a victim.

All who defend Prosser want people to believe he's just a victim? Why would a newspaper that cares at all about its credibility write like that? The usage collapses on its own lack of internal cohesion. There's no way the Capital Times has checked out everyone who has attempted to defend Prosser. And who could believe that — in amongst all those defenders — not a single person had seen any complexity in the story, that they all said he's just a victim?

It's knee-jerk politics too, but can you even stand to read it long enough to form an opinion of the politics? The first word of the first sentence repels the thinking reader.

"In my career of 50 some years I have never come across a situation where the majority leader of any party could determine that the votes of another party could not count. This is the height of arrogance."

Said Wisconsin state Senator Fred Risser, contempt-of-senate-uously.

The link goes to the Cap Times, a local "mainstream" rag, which doesn't bother to find out what the Democratic Senators are supposed to do to get out of the contempt they were found to be in.

"Even allies backpedal from Walker's extremism" says a headline in the Madison newspaper The Capital Times.

This is a political analysis piece written by the newspaper's editor Paul Fanlund, and I just can't figure out how the headline is justified. The piece begins with a cite to the NYT Magazine's profile of Chris Christie, which got me running over there to find out what Christie said about Walker. The author of that piece — Matt Bai — discusses Walker:

Now a new class of governors from both parties is promising to revisit union contracts in order to put their states on firmer fiscal ground. In Wisconsin, Scott Walker, an aggressive new Republican governor, just proposed legislation that would limit the rights of public workers to collectively bargain. “You can’t have one group who are the haves,” Walker told me recently, meaning government workers, “and one group, the private-sector workers, who are the have-nots.” Walker’s move led to protests in Madison, drawing President Obama into the debate and raising the prospect of French-style labor uprisings among public workers across America.

In part, the viral movement against public-sector unions is a result of political necessity. In states all over the country, balancing the budget has become an annual exercise in Copperfield-like illusion...

I don't see Christie backing away from Walker.

(And as for Matt Bai's "drawing President Obama into the debate" — I think Obama is keeping his distance!)

"Without explanation, sometime during the last 24 hours, The Cap Times changed the term tea 'baggers' to tea 'partiers' in the third paragraph of Bill Novak's article."

"Why was this done and does The Cap Times consider this practice to be an example of good journalism?"

So wrote Meade in the comments over here, at a Bill Novak blog post, and his comment is now being addressed at a Cap Times blog post, written by  Chris Murphy. Murphy's headline is "What do you think, is writing 'tea baggers' off-limits?"

It's not clear to me if Mr. Meade was taking issue with the lack of explanation, using the word in the first place or changing it. I've e-mailed him to ask (and also to find out if he's the same Laurence Meade who won Ann Althouse's heart through his comments on her blog), but no response yet.

The objection is — I think it's obvious — to using it in the first place and then to changing it without owning up to the fact that you'd done it and that a correction was required.

If it's the lack of explanation that was the issue, well, now you have it...

Put the correction at the site of the original article, not in some other blog post somewhere. You had one thing, and then you replaced it with something else when there was criticism. It's not the explanation that's wanted. It's the transparency. We know the explanation. You got criticized.

... but what if he objected to changing it? Are there a lot of you out there who think we, especially at the liberal-from-the-day-we-were-born Capital Times shouldn't think twice about using a word that raises conservative hackles? I certainly do see it regularly in the comments from tea party opponents.

Yes, we live in Madison, Wisconsin, where cluelessness skews left.

... I don't think it's that bad, but I can't say I'm comfortable seeing it in a news story, either. The Associated Press, whose stylebook is the arbiter on many such questions, has not yet weighed in, though its most recent edition does say that "tea party" should be lowercase. Lots of help there. So I'll ask you, gentle readers, what do you think our policy should be?

Oh, good lord.

ADDED: Meade writes:

"So I'll ask you, gentle readers, what do you think our policy should be?"

Dear Mr. Murphy,

I think your policy should be based on sound journalistic principles - not what your readers think.

Sincerely,
A Gentle Reader