Anti-Walker chanting, Green Bay style... plus: a mini-stampede.

Yesterday in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Governor Scott Walker was signing the budget repair bill inside Fox Valley Metal-Tech building, while anti-Walker protesters lined the street outside. My edit of Meade's video highlights the difficulty getting a good chant going and — beginning at 2:34 — the crowd movement and mini-stampede that occurs when they think they see Walker leaving the building.

Chris Wallace throws a softball question at Michelle Bachmann, then is bullied into apologizing...

... and Bachmann won't even accept the apology!

When did people become so humorless? Wallace — who seems like a sweetheart — asked "Are you a flake?" Obviously, he was saying, in a cute and pithy way A lot of people would like to portray you as some kind of flake: What do you have to say to them?

It was an easy set up for her to attack those people who say things like that. Why pillory Wallace?

Here's the video of him apologizing. Bachmann's response (at the link above) was: "I think that it's insulting to insinuate that a candidate for president is less than serious." Is it insulting to insinuate that a candidate for President is too serious. Lighten up, Michelle.

UPDATE: Bachmann later accepts the apology, explaining that initially she had not heard from him personally. There was just that video. Later, he called and she was "happy to accept" the apology.

"Girls as young as one are being forced into sex change operations in India by parents desperate for a son."

"Surgeons in the city of Indore are reported to be 'converting' hundreds of girls a year, who are subsequently pumped full of hormone drugs."

"If it's Kansas, Missouri, no big deal. You know, that's the dance of the low-sloping foreheads. The middle places, right?"

It's NYT columnist David Carr, saying something aloud on Bill Maher's show the other day. I thought I'd better nail that down here because "low-sloping foreheads" is obviously already a big meme. It's the cool new way to say "flyover states."

And, to save you the trouble of trying to remember it and look it up, here's David Carr's 2008 NYT Magazine telling the story of his crackhead past.

Every addict is formed in the crucible of the memory of that first hit. Even as the available endorphins attenuate, the memory is right there. By 1985, I tried freebasing coke and its more prosaic sibling, crack.

“Crackhead” is an embarrassing line item to have on a résumé. If meth tweakers had not come along and made a grab for the crown — meth makes you crazy and toothless — crackheads would be at the bottom of the junkie org chart. In the beginning, smokable cocaine fills you with childlike wonder, a feeling that the carnival had come to town and chosen your cranium as the venue for its next show. There is only one thing that appeals after a hit of crack, and it is not a brisk walk around the block to clear one’s head. Most people who sample it get a sense of its lurid ambush and walk away.

Many years later, my pal Donald sat in a cabin in Newport, Minn., staring into a video camera I had brought and recalling the crackhead version of me.

Have a little pity on the poor man, even as he's disparaging other people's heads. Remember he has disparaged his own head.

"I'm not sure who makes me laugh more: the Rock....or the guy at the back of the log boat."

"I vote for the guy in the back. A lesser known member of the Rock's entourage."

Via Throwing Things, commenting on "Things I enjoyed during our viewing of Cars 2 more than the movie itself," and all I can say is that if there really is a 3D Morgan Freeman dolphin movie coming, let's hop in the log boat with the Rock and get out of here.

Blaska attempts to extract details from Lueders about his unnamed sources in the Wisconsin Supreme Court.

Blaska's at the Isthmus, where Lueders worked for 25 years before moving on to the mysterious outfit that calls itself the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism.

Blaska asked Lueders about his “three knowledgeable sources” who supposedly had to remain unnamed to "maintain their professional relationships." Blaska said that his "inescapable conclusion" was that they were Justice Ann Walsh Bradley, Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson, "and their liberal court ally, Justice Patrick Crooks."

Lueders replied:

The sources are people we considered reliable. We very carefully represented that they alleged certain events. They did. Justice Bradley has now made the same allegation in her comments to the Journal Sentinel. Your ‘inescapable conclusion’ is incorrect. Beyond that I have nothing more to say.

It's like a logic puzzle, isn't it? It's like in "Clue" when you make an accusation like Mr. Green with the lead pipe in the conservatory. You check the secret cards, and it's the wrench, not the lead pipe, but you were right about Mr. Green and the conservatory. You slip the cards back into the little black envelope and tell the other players you were wrong. They don't know how wrong.

By the way, Blaska is making noises about a singalong in the Capitol today to rival the "Solidarity Singers who have been singing sad songs of dissent in the Capitol Rotunda for at least four months now." But for some reason, he thinks he needs a permit, and so — like that silent majority march the other day — he's proposing a silent demonstration:

Be there at 11:45 a.m. Bring your sheet music -- make 10 copies -- and signs (sans sticks). I’ll do likewise. We’ll stand silently in a group in the middle of the singers -- unless they have a permit for that day -- holding our pro-Walker signs but saying nothing. My sign will read “Can we have our Capitol back?”

What songs would the conservatives sing (if they could get permission)?

I’m thinking songs like “God Bless America,” the theme to the Flintstones, Gilligan’s Island and -- in honor of wheelchair-bound patriot Dave Zien, "Born to be Wild!" Sunny Schubert suggests the Beatles’ “Taxman.” 

Yeah, conservatives should show up and celebrate the signing of the budget bill, the momentous event that occurred yesterday. Maybe you didn't notice. It was overshadowed by the gigantic turd Lueders felt moved to drop at exactly that moment.

The protest today in Green Bay as Scott Walker signed the budget bill.

New Media Meade was there, not inside for the signing ceremony, but outside photographing the crowd of about 300 protesters. He brought home a lot of stills and video. Here's one:



This one is impressively up-to-date with "Walker: Take the 'Prosser-hold' off Wisconsin":