On the 2nd anniversary of the Wisconsin uprising, "about 100" protesters march up State Street.

"The rally began on Library Mall in the late afternoon, with participants, including a number of UW-Madison students, sporting anti-Walker and pro-union signs."

The protesters made their way down State Street alternately taking up call and response chants. A few supporters joined from the sidewalk before the ralliers ended their march at the Capitol while singing “Solidarity Forever” to the tune of “Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

Volunteers in red MTI hats passed out hand-held candles and as darkness set in, people passed lighters to start “The Fire Still Burns Vigil” to represent the protesters’ continued work against Walker. The Capitol steps were quickly engulfed with flickering candles and anti-Walker protest songs.

Fighting over posters... it's like something that would happen in a dorm room

But it happened in the Wisconsin legislative assembly.

"This is a sham," cried Brett Hulsey.

I read that aloud and Meade went "Sham! Sham! Sham!" — which is amusing if you know your Wisconsin protest references. (If you don't, look at this and this and this.)

Anti-abortion man, who yelled from a tree at the Inauguration, is charged with a crime.

Rives Miller Grogan was charged "with violating a previous order to stay away from the U.S. Capitol, and with violating laws that require authorities to 'preserve the peace and secure the Capitol from defacement,' and with 'preventing any portion of the Capitol Grounds and terraces to used [sic] as playgrounds ... to protect the public property, turf and grass from destruction.'

He had just been arrested and charged with disorderly conduct last week, after police said he shouted from the gallery of the U.S. Senate. He’s been convicted five times in the District since 2009, mostly on charges of disorderly conduct and disobeying police....

Police said Grogan once dropped to the ground in the Capitol Rotunda while clutching a doll and screamed in front of 60 visitors. Another time, police said, he paced the Capitol steps holding a bible and shouting, “Stop killing the babies.”....

Officer Shennell S. Antrobus, a U.S. Capitol Police spokesman, said officials decided to leave Grogan in the tree until after the swearing in to avoid disruptions. Police said he came down on his own after five hours.

Some of this reminds me of our tenacious Wisconsin protesters, whose deep convictions and emotive righteousness have led them to specialize in loud annoyingness and innumerable petty violations. Grogan is different from them too. He's driven by religious fervor, and he's not on the left.

What are the limits of protest?

ADDED: This story reminds me of an old Sunday School song:



I remember singing that as a child and feeling embarrassed by how cute the adults found it whenever a child did the spoken-word part, "Zacchaeus, you come down." Are children's songs written to amuse children or to lure children into performances that will amuse adults? If the latter, is it wrong?

Here's the Bible story, in chapter 19 of Luke:

Jesus entered Jericho and was passing through. A man was there by the name of Zacchaeus; he was a chief tax collector and was wealthy. He wanted to see who Jesus was, but because he was short he could not see over the crowd. So he ran ahead and climbed a sycamore-fig tree to see him, since Jesus was coming that way.

When Jesus reached the spot, he looked up and said to him, “Zacchaeus, come down immediately. I must stay at your house today.” So he came down at once and welcomed him gladly.

All the people saw this and began to mutter, “He has gone to be the guest of a sinner.”

Jesus looked with favor on the tax collector, it was his method to conspicuously reach out to those who seemed conspicuously to be sinners when there was a more subtle point that all are sinners and he is reaching out to all of us.

But Zacchaeus stood up and said to the Lord, “Look, Lord! Here and now I give half of my possessions to the poor, and if I have cheated anybody out of anything, I will pay back four times the amount.”

Jesus said to him, “Today salvation has come to this house, because this man, too, is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.”

Lefties and righties can argue about what (if anything) Jesus meant to say about taxation. One might say, as I suggested above, that Zacchaeus was chosen because the people had a stereotype equating tax collection with sin, so he easily became The Sinner, for Jesus to bounce his lesson off of. But you might say that Zacchaeus's conversion shows the importance of taxation when it is used to take accumulated wealth from the rich and to distribute it to the poor. That's not the way the taxation of the time was used, and Zacchaeus had become wealthy through his tax collection work. So he's more like a typical rich man, and he is declared saved because he instantly gave half his possessions to the poor, without regard to whether that wealth was ill-gotten. Zacchaeus makes a second promise, to give quadruple restitution of any ill-gotten gains.

What is the proper tax rate for the rich? The Bible implies that it's 50% and that the spending should go toward alleviating poverty. And that's not a 50% income tax, by the way, Mr. Buffet. That's a wealth tax. You should cough up about $15 billion to get right with God.

A slice of Wisconsin politics.

I framed this screenshot from the lead article at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel webpage:



Meade sent me that link and highlighted the quote: "A few dozen protesters gathered in the rotunda, and their shouts were at times barely audible inside the Assembly chamber during the address."

Wistful echoes of 2 years ago, when thousands of protesters jammed the Capitol and banged drums and chanted for weeks on end.

Meanwhile, in the sidebar over there:

Feingold calls for legislation to rid election campaigns of corruption

And I call for peace on earth and goodwill toward men.

That second sidebar link — "Man arrested at Capitol had earlier run-in with police" — refers to something that is also in the Scott Walker article: "In one surprise at the Capitol Tuesday, police arrested a 20-year-old Milwaukee man for entering the building with what he claimed were Molotov cocktails in his backpack.... So far, however, no evidence has turned up that Smith knew about Walker's speech or was targeting it specifically."

Random Molotov-cockery, not necessarily Scott-Walker-related.

"A well-known Capitol protester was charged Wednesday with receiving stolen property for allegedly keeping a State Capitol police officer's jacket..."

We've reached a very late stage in the Wisconsin protests, which begin in February 2011:

The jacket belonged to Officer Tammy Torstenson, who said she had taken off her jacket during protests at the Capitol and put it behind her work station but later found that it was missing, according to the complaint.

The mother of Jeremy J. "Segway" Ryan, 24, of Madison, found the jacket in October while she was cleaning out Ryan's apartment....

Ryan said he never wore the jacket outside his apartment but would put it on as a joke when friends were over, "because being a Capitol Police officer is a joke to him and his friends"....

The Capitol Police were a joke to them? Here's something I wrote in September 2011:

In observing the protests nearly every day through the entire period of the protests, Meade and I often tried to figure out what the police were doing, including the Capitol police. There seemed to be a policy of facilitating the protesters, perhaps because it actually was the best strategy for maintaining order when the police were vastly outnumbered. I have video of protesters assuring me that "The police are on our side."

"Maybe she can get one of those Wisconsin doctors to write her a fake note."

Instapundit's intro to "Where’s Hillary’s Medical Report?"

Here's my original 2/19/11 report on the doctors offering to write sick notes for protesters who were skipping work for the Wisconsin protests:

At first I thought it was some sort of comic street theater, but it was, apparently, real doctors, defending what they were doing.... I asked if it was dishonest or unethical, and the answer was that everyone has symptoms, perhaps a migraine, diarrhea, or insomnia....

In that light, I'm sure Hillary does have symptoms. She's probably suffering horribly from the anxiety around the Benghazi attack and the possibility that she might have to speak about it. And she keeps telling us she's tired:

RUSH: Susan Rice last night on the NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams.  He played a portion of his interview with Susan Rice, and then he asked her, "Why was it you that Sunday morning?" Why did they send you out there to every Sunday show, five of them?  "Of all the people in government, why the US Ambassador the United Nations answering questions about the attack at Benghazi?"

RICE:  Secretary Clinton had originally been asked by most of the networks to go on.  She had had an incredibly grueling week dealing with the protests around the Middle East and North Africa.  I was asked. I was willing to do so. It wasn't what I had planned for that weekend originally, but I don't regret doing that.

RUSH:  Did you hear what she just said there?  She said they asked her to go 'cause Hillary was tired. Hillary Clinton had originally been asked by most of the networks to go on.  It was Obama who shut it down.  Obama wanted Susan Rice out there.  He wanted somebody far away from the story telling this lie that it was the video that led to the unrest.  Somebody close to it woulda had a little bit tougher time with any credibility telling the lie. But you get Susan Rice, she's distant. She is the UN ambassador, got nothing to do with Benghazi, not in the State Department. She has no representation at the consulate or at Benghazi, send her out there, and so Brian Williams said, "Why send you?"  "Well, you know, Hillary, she originally was asked, but she really had a grueling week.  I mean, dealing with protests in the Middle East and North Africa, she was really tired."

Hillary Clinton and Susan Rice — the spent and the expendable.

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker talks with Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporters for an hour.

The first 10 minutes have Walker saying that he won't pursue right-to-work legislation and that he doesn't want anything that will stir up the the kind of passion and protest we saw here in 2011. This has obvious political value for him, but the main idea is that businesses want calm and certainty. Those who've protested Walker should see that they've successfully inhibited him from taking further steps in the direction they oppose.

"I am no fan of radio hosts who get mean and personal. So I shed no tears for the Radio Sly-mer..."

"... who was this afternoon fired from WTDY-AM 1670 after 15 years," says David Blaska, as Midwest Family Radio dumps local talk radio and picks up the CBS sports package.

I call him the Sly-mer because he did things like call then-Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice an Aunt Jemima. He suggested that Wisconsin’s lieutenant governor performed sexual favors to win election, rejoiced at her diagnosis of cancer, and made fun of her children.

The man was on for 4 hours a day, 5 days a week, so it's not surprising that — trying to be interesting/exciting/outrageous — he went too far sometimes, presumably many times. Such is life in free-speech America.

He obstructed my ability to hear Sarah Palin one time:



So what if he was a big old lefty asshole? He had his place here in Madison, where there should be local talk radio. It's sad to lose the voice of John "Sly" Sylvester. Ironically, the conservative talk channel, with Sly's counterpart Vicki McKenna, raves on. In Madison!

You may be able to look out your downtown Madison window and see Barack Obama and Bruce Springsteen, but don't you dare.

"The counter terrorism teams have to be cognizant of movement in windows for obvious reasons... Please cooperate with their needs and stay away from those windows. We, too, would like to watch, but we need to avoid the urge."

Yeah, when Obama appeared right outside my office window — just a few weeks ago — I got email telling me that if I looked out my window I could expect a visit from the police. Then they just shut down the whole law school building for the entire day and closed all the blinds. They hung a giant building-sized curtain all down one side of a dorm that had a view of the central mall where the President appeared.

And now he's coming back to the City of Obama Love — Madison, Wisconsin — to create a final burst of glowing adoration on the morning before Election Day, and our town is thrown into disarray once again for photo-op purposes, because we are the fresh-faced folk who still gaze upon him with awe. There are the young people — whose professors will undoubtedly free them from classes once again — and the aging liberals — who will surely feel the pull of the lugubrious dronings of Mr. Springsteen.

City employees have also been warned. "Offices facing MLK Jr., Blvd. and Wilson Street will need to be locked and vacant with the blinds drawn," Mayor Paul Soglin wrote in an email Friday afternoon to staff and city alders. "Adherence to this directive is imperative as the health and safety of our employees may be negatively impacted if we fail to enforce this directive," he added.

Adherence to this directive is imperative as the health and safety of our employees may be negatively impacted if we fail to enforce this directive.... jeez, he's talking like a robot! What are they threatening to do to us if we look out a window? Negatively impact us....

We're told the city streets downtown will begin closing Sunday morning, a full day before the appearance. People are asked to amass at the top of State Street and form 2 lines which will proceed in opposite directions around the Capitol Square to the site of the rally (which is right in front of the City-County Building, the place you go to early-vote). Picture all 4 sides of the Capitol Square streaming with political people. A fabulous photo-op, which might remind us of the big Wisconsin protests of 2011 — you know, those anti-Scott Walker demonstrations which Barack Obama steered way clear of. He wasn't there for the demonstrations or to boost Walker's opponent in the recall election last spring. Obama wasn't there for the Madison lefty-liberals when they needed him, but they'll be there — presumably! — when he needs them.

Given the hasty plans for the rally, Lindskoog [a downtown parking manager] is anticipating gridlock and scarce parking will greet anyone who ventures downtown after 6 a.m. Monday. The crowd, he says, is anticipated to hit 50,000.

"We're hoping people treat this like a snow day," he said with a laugh.

Ha ha. Like a snow day. Like some sort of natural disaster that shuts a city down. That's always so fun. And don't come downtown, anybody, because it will be a nightmare, but be sure to come downtown, everybody, because there's a fabulous festival unreeling in our town again, our town, the President's favorite town, where he loves the way you love him. Now, smile for the cameras, Madison people. You're the chosen scenery once again!

Homeless protest in Madison.

"It’s constant harassment all the time from people walking around the streets looking at us funny to other people stealing our stuff, and now on top of it, even the city people, the police … are throwing our stuff away."

The "stuff" was left unattended on the public sidewalk near the Capitol Square, and the police stored the removed material and even tried to track down the owners.

Tenant Resource Center Executive Director Brenda Konkel said the city’s procedure for removing abandoned property is... "a violation of homeless people’s rights...."

Meade goes to Obamastock.

Me, I was working yesterday, even locked out of the law school, so I didn't make it to the big political rally in the center of campus — Bascom Mall. But Meade was there, and he was really inspired. He wrote a song about his nearly ecstatic experience, and he won't stop singing. It goes like this:

I came upon a child of Obam-a
She was walking by Sterling Hall
So I asked her, "Where are you going?"
And this she told me...

"I'm going up to Bascom Mall,
I'm gonna join in a political rally
Gonna put out my two hands
Try and keep my birth control free.

We are starstruck
We're beholden
And we've got to keep ourselves in government lardon."

Then can I walk beside you?
I have come here to dialogue
And with a Flip cam, I feel like Herzog,
Artistically burning.

Well maybe it's just not our year,
And maybe, well, Yes We Can
But Tammy B and Mark Pocan
Have my stomach churning.

We are starstruck
We're beholden
And we've got to keep ourselves in government lardon.

By the time we got to Bascom,
We were thirty thousand strong
Everywhere you looked - career politicians.

And I dreamed I saw drone bombers
Chooming roof hits in the sky,
Turning into Obama Pies
O'er Bascom Nation

We are starstruck
We're beholden
And we've got to keep ourselves in government lardon.

This is what Wisconsin protesting looks like...

... these days.

Last year's vast crowds were a magnet for all sorts of people, and some of them were individuals with problems of their own, looking for meaning within a group. As the crowds disperse, who is left? What can they do? Where is the meaning?

If the seeming meaning they found does not remain and cannot be revived, perhaps these once-lost souls feel that they are dying.

The crime of insulting journalists.

As the Wisconsin State Journal puts it:

Jeremy Ryan, 24, of Madison is accused of hurling taunts and insults at journalists, including singing insulting songs about the death of a longtime journalist, Richard Wheeler. Wheeler died suddenly in November 2011, and the Capitol press room was named for him after his death.

Ryan also shouted derogatory names for news organizations, including the State Journal....

On the Capitol Square, today in Madison...

A Farmers Market day...



No protesters around the Hans Christian Heg statue. The sun is shining on the strings of peppers, and everyone seems pretty happy.



Around on the State Street side of the Square, there was protest activity...



... of a tired, embarrassing kind.

When a Dane County Judge throws out the Wisconsin collective bargaining reform law, should progressives or conservatives celebrate?

It's not obvious, though the protesters at the Capitol yesterday — they were there to support the Chicago teachers strike — exulted at the news.

If you step back for the long view — like between now and November 6th — and consider the near certainty that the decision will be reversed on appeal, the spectacle of liberal judicial activism is good for the conservative cause.

(Here's some info on the case, if you're not familiar with it.)

"Egypt, Libya/Madison, Wisconsin/Civil Unrest Is Best."

Just an old Wisconsin protest sign — photographed in February 2011 — with new resonance this week. I ran across that in the process of researching my "civility bullshit" tag in writing the previous post. In the comments to that 2011 post, somebody says, "Now that was rude..." — referring to the man with the "Egypt, Libya/Madison" sign who leans over to Meade and says "Get your head fucked." I answer the commenter:

And yet, somehow, I laugh, every time I hear it, and I've played it 20 times. It's now a stock phrase at Meadehouse.

I read that after replaying the old video and laughing once again at the self-righteous, lefty protester who leans over and mutters "Get your head fucked." Somehow that never gets old. At least not in America. I wouldn't laugh if I lived in Egypt or Libya.

You can video the police videoing you videoing them videoing you...

... okay, now, finally, at last, everyone can video everybody...

It's like a Quentin Tarantino "Mexican standoff."

Spontaneous and non-spontaneous protests at the Capitol.

Here's an interview with the new Wisconsin Capitol Police Chief Dave Erwin, giving some explanation for the new, stronger enforcement of the rules than we saw under the prior chief, Charles Tubbs, who tolerated some pretty extreme protests activity in our Capitol.

Now, we're hearing about arrests that trouble those of us who care about free speech. The Capitol rotunda is an extremely desirable location for protesters. It's also a place that people use and enjoy for all kinds of organized and casual purposes. The center of the floor in the rotunda is a popular spot for protest singers and sign-holders and also — when they're not afraid of getting stepped on — for children who lie down to stare up into the dome. How do you manage these divergent and conflicting uses? Erwin says:

In the administrative codes we have an exemption for spontaneous events. Spontaneous events will occur and we will protect and there will be no enforcement actions.

But permitted events, if you have a permit, we have to share this building. We can’t let a few people — because they’re vocal — have their way here in this building and we’re not going to. And we’re going to move forward with enforcement. If you don’t have a permit, ask for one. It doesn’t cost anything to get a permit. I sign them all the time.

Preserving the ability to have sudden spontaneous protests is key. Those should not require a permit... and they don't. It might be hard sometimes to distinguish between spontaneous and non-spontaneous, but there are some clear cases:

Where you have an event when you hand out song books and you meet every day, that’s not a spontaneous event.  When the same players show up every day in participating in an event, whether that’s holding signs — that they’ve put a lot of labor of love into. 

Labor of love... that is, the care that went into making the sign is evidence of non-spontaneity. The protesters could take care to look careless. But if permit process is so easy, whenever you'd consider making that kind of effort, it would be easier to get the permit. I don't think the protesters want to concede they ought to have to get a permit, and even if it is easy to get a permit, would the same group be able to claim the prime rotunda space every weekday noon hour? And once there's any judgment applied to denying the permits, there will be charges of discrimination against those who are protesting the government.

The saga continues.

Biking down by Lake Wingra, we encounter some kind of political polka...

"Rosary rallies" at the Wisconsin Capital are partisan politics....

... according to some partisans of the side that is not the one the reciters of Catholic prayers are supposedly partisan for.

Local organizers are continuing the rallies every Thursday through Nov. 1 to focus people's prayers on issues such as religious liberty and opposition to abortion and contraception, said the Rev. Rick Heilman, pastor of St. Ignatius Catholic Church in Mount Horeb.

Heilman said Nov. 1 was chosen as the last rally because the weather will be turning colder and because it is All Saint's Day, during which Catholics honor all saints....

At the Aug. 16 rally, Heilman told the crowd that "amazing things are happening right here in this very place," including the failure of "this whole nonsense of recalling this strong governor" (referring to Republican Scott Walker) and "now tapping our own Paul Ryan" as a vice presidential candidate....

Craig Spaulding, 47, of Madison, one of about a dozen counter-protesters who have been attending the rallies, doesn't buy it. "It's definitely partisan," he said. "It's all about the GOP."

The Freedom From Religion Foundation, based in Madison, has been watching the rallies with concern. Tax-exempt groups such as churches are not to say or do anything that indicates whom they want people to vote for or against, said Annie Laurie Gaylor, co-president.