"Students form a perimeter around the #ConcernedStudent1950 tent village and ask media to leave."

"This is what civic-level censorship looks like at a university with the largest and oldest public college for journalism."



ADDED: The protesting students are making many rudimentary PR mistakes here and could use some training in basic protest technique. They end up looking repressive and brutish, right in front of a camera, and they keep cranking up the intimidation. The photographer knows he's getting video that he'll be able to put up on the internet, and he's using a very effective technique of remaining calm and standing his ground in the face of what looks like scary intimidation. I have walked with a camera into big, passionate protests here in Wisconsin, and — with a few exceptions — the protesters were much better prepared to resist making the photographer seem like a sympathetic victim.

As for the First Amendment: The students and the photographers have free speech rights against the government, but not against each other. At 1:43, the photographer calmly cites the First Amendment, which, he says, gives all of them all "right to be here," in the public space, which is true. One of the black female protesters says "We do have our space as human beings," to which the photographer responds, emphasizing each word: "There's not a law about that." The woman then makes what I think is the most interesting statement in the video: "Forget a law. How about humanity? Respect?" He says, "How about documenting this for posterity?"

That's right where a good conversation could have begun. The law is not the beginning and end of how people treat each other. There is etiquette and there is respect. There is even love. As human beings, we want all of that. Please respect our space is an understandable request that a person should evaluate in ways that go beyond legal rights. The photographer did engage on that level when he offered a counter-value, documentation for posterity.

Unfortunately, that one-to-one conversation ended when another woman barged in and started yelling, precluding the development of the issues about photographing people who don't want to be photographed, and the crowd —which probably didn't notice the touching moment when Respect and Documentation stood face to face —  got going with the old "Hey hey ho ho" chant format: "Hey hey ho ho/Reporters have got to go."

Madison lefties make an event out of watching the GOP debate and say things like "I think anyone in this room could answer these questions more intelligently than any of the men on stage."

The local Madison newspaper reports.

About a hundred people, some wearing “Solidarity” t-shirts, others sporting Hillary Clinton stickers or Russ Feingold buttons, packed into a room at the Essen Haus in Madison on Thursday night to watch Gov. Scott Walker participate in the first GOP debate of the 2016 presidential campaign....

“I want to see Donald Trump attack other Republicans,” said Joshua Sanchez, who had his “GOP Debate Bingo” card poised and ready to go on the table in front of him....

“I’m just expecting them to be piranhas and eat each other up,” said attendee Sandi Penzkover. “Their egos really get in the way. They’re making a mockery of the presidency. I just view them as little boys, adolescents arguing.”

Of course, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker was a special object of contempt:

The crowd, wedged into the Essen Haus meeting room and nursing their beers and eating cheese curds and onion rings, came to attention for all of Walker’s sparse speaking time.... 

The arguably biggest reaction of the night, however, was when, nearing the end of the debate, the governor mentioned his face off with “100,000 protestors.” At that point, cheers seemed to echo through all of Essen Haus and [the overflow venue] Come Back Inn.

Drudge eggs us on with oviform images.

The O — emphasis on O — bama balloon. The horse — PharOah — 's eye. And an actual story about eggs — "Egg rationing in America has officially begun...."

Or is it just me? I'm not eating eggs this morning. I breakfast on peanut butter and sesame seeds. But I'm in the middle of a long email conversation about eggs (in which the question has arisen: Is the medium-boiled egg the height of perfection on soft-to-hard-boiled continuum?)

MEANWHILE: In Milwaukee: "'Focus on Jobs, Not Vaginas' Deliver Their Eggs to Scott Walker."



IN THE COMMENTS: Eric the Fruit Bat said: "The hard-boiled egg is God's way of telling anybody who will listen that you don't have to be a fat fuck anymore. Ever sit down and eat a bag of Doritos? Cookies? M & Ms? A six pack of beer? Of course you did, you fat fuck. But nobody, ever, in the entire history of recorded time, has ever plopped his sorry fat ass down in front of a TV set and scarfed down a dozen hard-boiled eggs. Nobody." That got me looking for the "I'm gonna eat 50 eggs" scene from "Cool Hand Luke":



And — while we're on movies — Saint Croix said: "Hitchcock hated eggs. He was a total egg-o-phobe. When feminists say he was a misogynist, I say, no, he just hated eggs. In To Catch A Thief, Grace Kelly's Mom stabs an egg with her cigarette. Dr. Freud! Calling Dr. Freud!"



(That last image is one of Martin Sichetti's paintings of stills from Hitchcock films.)

"Nate Silver fared terribly in Thursday's UK election... The fault, Silver claimed, was with the polling."

Don't blame Silver, says Silver. He only processes the data he gets from polls done by other people.

"The World May Have A Polling Problem," Silver asserted. "In fact, it’s become harder to find an election in which the polls did all that well."... "[T]here are lots of reasons to worry about the state of the polling industry," Silver concluded, citing a range of factors. "There may be more difficult times ahead for the polling industry."

Well, that's awfully bland... from Dylan Byers at Politico, who was only processing the raw material Silver gave him. Can I blame Silver? For anything, ever? He cited "a range of factors." Were they too dull and meaningless to be worth more than the repetition of the conclusion that polls just aren't that good?

ADDED: The NYT surveys some analysis of what went wrong with the polls:

“It could be simply that people lied to the pollsters, that they were shy or that they genuinely had a change of heart on polling day,” [said Alberto Nardelli, writing in The Guardian], “Or there could be more complicated underlying challenges within the polling industry, due, for example, to the fact that a diminishing number of people use landlines or that Internet polls are ultimately based on a self-selected sample.”...

“What seems to have gone wrong is that people have said one thing and they did something else in the ballot box,” [said Peter Kellner, the president of YouGov, a leading survey firm]. “We are not as far out as we were in 1992, not that that is a great commendation.”...

Rem Korteweg, a senior research fellow at the Center for European Reform in London, said... “People say who they are voting for with their heart and then vote with their wallets,”...

To tweak Korteweg's point: People say what they think will make other people like them, but they do what they think is in their interest. Re-tweak: People do what is in their interest, which is to say what they believe is socially desirable, and that won't square up with what they do when no one's looking. If this is the problem, it's a problem that will get worse as it becomes more widely believed that liberalism makes you look good. Korteweg is contributing to the contagion of this belief by saying that in their hearts people are liberal, nudging us all to say I'm a liberal, so I'll seem to be a person with a heart.



(Detail about that video here.)

"The latest attack on Walker is that he has 'up to' $50,000 in credit card debt to — wait for it — Sears."

"The Daily News does the hit on Walker, from the angle of it proving he’s not really a fiscal conservative.... Hello, it’s SEARS!... I don’t see how any of this hurts Walker."

Well, there's one thing that was proved a long time ago about Scott Walker: If you strike him down, he will become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.

I live in Madison, Wisconsin, surrounded by people who — I think — are thinking How the hell did this happen? We crushed him with 100,000 protesters. We destroyed him....

Do not attempt to destroy The Walker. 

I don't know what that man bought at Sears, but maybe you should be shopping at Sears. Maybe something in the appliance department... maybe the tools... I don't know. Be careful, people.

"Resistance is not part of civil disobedience."

"Civil disobedience is a symbolic non-violent violation of the law.... The act must be nonviolent, open and visible, illegal, performed for the moral purpose of protesting an injustice, and done with the expectation of being punished."

Madison Mayor Paul Soglin instructs, explaining the arrests of the high school students who, protesting the police shooting of Tony Robinson, may have resisted police efforts to relocate them from the street to the sidewalk.

"In the future, while all of these protests are evaluated on a case-by-case basis, MPD will not be facilitating extended street closures."

In the past, the police have facilitated protests that took over the street. During the big protests of 2011, we saw police cars blocking the streets so cars could not get through. We've had it personally explained to us by a police officer that redirecting the cars was considered the best approach.

I don't know what the precise policy is, but I note the word "extended" in the mayor's statement. I guess the police will facilitate your street-blocking protest in Madison, but not for too long. I hope it means that where there are marches confined to the sidewalks (or State Street), police ought to stop traffic to let the whole march cross an intersection as a single, densely packed group. But the phrase "on a case-by-case basis" hints of: 1. something that permits flash-mobbish takeovers of the streets, and 2. something that could be applied — consciously or unconsciously — in a way that is not viewpoint neutral.

"Dozens of high school students protesting the fatal police shooting of Tony Robinson closed down one of Madison’s main thoroughfares for eight hours Tuesday..."

"... as police, taking a largely hands-off approach, redirected the crawling streams of traffic to side streets."

The protest began around 10:30 a.m. when dozens of students walked out of East [High School] and gathered on East Washington Avenue in front of the school. By 1:30 p.m., students from West High School, who held an earlier rally on Regent Street, and other protesters joined the students from East, eventually blocking all six lanes of traffic....

Shortly after 6:30 p.m....police declared the event an unlawful assembly and began moving people toward the sidewalks. Several demonstrators who refused to comply were arrested.

Police said four people were arrested and another 11 were cited and released. Derrick McCann, 29, was arrested and received a citation for “causing or obstructing the street, sidewalk, alley or crosswalk.” “I feel like it’s really a civil rights movement,” McCann said. “I didn’t do anything wrong ... we were peaceful.”

A county official is caught on surveillance cameras letting protesters into the City-County Building (which houses the Madison Police Department).

Dane County Board Sup. Leland Pan has had to give up his pass card and keys after what he did on the night a Madison police officer shot and killed a young black man:

“Our resources were stretched extremely thin, yet the protesters grew in numbers and their anger increased as they neared the police department,” [Madison Police Chief Mike Koval said in a letter of complaint]. “In addition to commissioned officers working in this building 24 hours a day, there are civilian employees. Quite frankly, these civilian employees were very scared for their safety.”

Building surveillance video doesn’t show much emotion on the faces of people coming into the building shortly after midnight on March 7, but Koval said the protesters were heard yelling things such as “kill the cops” and “we have guns too.”...

This makes me think about the way — back in March 2011 — protesters got into the Wisconsin State Capitol, entering through a window of the offices of one of the Democratic legislators. Meade was there and filmed it:

What's so bad about Scott Walker's "If I can take on 100,000 protesters, I can do the same across the globe"?

"I think the bust of Fighting Bob La Follette is kind of Soviet-like," says Meade, reading the previous post about the Islamic iconoclasm in Mosul and anti-Soviet iconoclasm in the former Soviet states (and the preservation of Soviet sculptures in Lithuania).

Here's a picture I took of the monumental head on February 25, 2011, a little over a week after the big protests had begun in and around the Wisconsin capitol:



I originally blogged that here, with other photographs, including one showing how some protesters had used the back of the Veterans Memorial as a component of what they called their "Information Station." 

And let me use this post to comment on something Scott Walker said at the end of his CPAC speech yesterday. What would he do about ISIS? "If I can take on 100,000 protesters, I can do the same across the globe." That was bad, obviously, and Walker has sent his spokeswoman to rephrase what was supposedly in The Head of Walker. (I'm saying "The Head of Walker" because I'm picturing a "Soviet-like" head of Walker some day, in the capitol, eye-to-eye with Bob La Follette, which would be the "more speech" alternative to iconoclasm.) The spokeswoman said:

Governor Walker... was in no way comparing any American citizen to ISIS. What the governor was saying was when faced with adversity he chooses strength and leadership. Those are the qualities we need to fix the leadership void this White House has created.

There's still a problem. How would the form of leadership demonstrated during the protests transfer to the war on terrorism? Scott Walker's approach to the protests was to let them play out — replete with loud chanting and drumming and lots of taped up signs in the capitol and huge marches outside — all the while knowing he had the votes in the legislature to pass the law that the protesters were protesting. He chose silent inaction, putting up with it, in a situation where he knew he'd win in the end, and, in fact, when the legislation finally passed, the protests ended. There was still the recall effort, and there was plenty more speech lambasting Walker, but Walker knew all along he had the upper hand, and instead of trying to counter the speech of the protesters (or even to get them cleared out of the capitol), he sat back and let them have what probably looked to most Wisconsinites like a big tantrum. He knew that the protesters knew that they could not cross the line from semi-organized protest to anything like violence or the threat of violence. The no-response response was therefore effective.

Is that the kind of leadership he's proposing to use in the war on terror? It can't be. The relevant component of leadership that I'm seeing is something I associate with George W. Bush: silent acceptance of abuse from his critics. Walker said "If I can take on 100,000 protesters," but he didn't take them on. He let them carry on. That may have been wise under the circumstances, but it tells us close to nothing about what he would do with enemies who won't limit themselves to protesting and when he can't control the outcome through partisan domination of a legislature. Sheer cockiness won't do the trick — "If I can take on 100,000 protesters, I can do the same across the globe." And that was a cockiness beyond what we saw — and got tired of — in George Bush.

The return of the "Shame!" chant to the Wisconsin state senate.

"#RightToWork passes 17-14, gallery shouting "Shame." #wipolitics" — video at the link.

Here's the "Shame!" chant of February 25, 2011.

Questioning Scott Walker's Christianity.

That's a cropped and tweaked version of a photograph of mine that I originally posted here on February 25, 2011. As I said yesterday, I've decided to repost some of my old photographs to show people — as they take an interest in our Wisconsin governor — the abuse Scott Walker took back in 2011.

I chose this photograph because of the plentiful talk this past week about Walker's refusal to express an opinion about whether President Obama is a Christian. I wanted you to see this old sign — taped to the marble wall of the Wisconsin Capitol as the anti-Walker protests raged. Whoever made that sign did not merely express the opinion that Walker is not a Christian. He presumed to speak in the voice of Jesus telling Scott Walker what to do and in the voice of Scott Walker directly and explicitly rejecting Jesus.

"Crowd chants 'Recall Walker' at #RightToWork rally."

I'm following the twitter feed here.

Union songs:

.@dailycardinal Union songs as people gather outside the Capitol #RightToWork pic.twitter.com/fzEYH6wBRl

— Emily Buck (@buckemily64) February 24, 2015

ADDED: You can watch live video of hearings and protests here.

"Walker, can I 'modestly' kick you in the nuts?"

As the nation turns its eyes to Scott Walker, I thought I'd start a new series, rerunning some of my old photographs that open a window to the past to give you something of a feeling for the abuse the man took back in 2011.

"The 'Sandwich Manifesto' sounds like a movie title right out of 1968/69."

Said Surfed in the comments to the previous post. And I knew exactly what he meant: "The Strawberry Statement"!



"The vibrations were good, but the times were bad."

The film came out in 1970, but it depicts the protests that took place at Columbia University in 1968.

ADDED: Maybe someone could make a movie about the Wisconsin protests of 2011 and call it "The Sandwich Manifesto." The protest scenes here were very similar to some of the scenes in that trailer, and — as noted earlier this morning — Scott Walker has made sandwiches his trademark.

"I asked the woman if by 'Dread Scott'... she meant to suggest a connection between Scott Walker and the era of slavery. She said 'Of course.'"

4 years ago today at the Wisconsin protests.

"A Dane County judge will allow a lawsuit over Madison teacher contracts to go forward in its entirety..."

"The lawsuit, brought by the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty with conservative blogger David Blaska as plaintiff, seeks a declaration that teacher contracts for the 2014-15 and 2015-16 school years violate Act 10, the legislation that virtually eliminated collective bargaining rights for most public workers."

The Madison School District and Madison teachers union argued that Blaska lacked standing, but Dane County Circuit Judge Richard Niess said (correctly) that under Wisconsin law, to sue local government, "a taxpayer need only show that he has sustained, or will sustain, some pecuniary loss, however infinitesimal."

(Act 10 is the legislation that led to all the protests here in Wisconsin, back in 2011.)

"Forced union dues are a critical cog in the corrupt bargain that is crushing taxpayers," says the Governor of Illinois.

"An employee who is forced to pay unfair share dues is being forced to fund political activity with which they disagree. That is a clear violation of First Amendment rights — and something that, as governor, I am duty bound to correct."

Illinois has a new governor. Have you noticed? It's Bruce Rauner, a Republican, and Illinois is now having an experience something like what happened in Wisconsin 4 years ago.

“Bruce Rauner’s scheme to strip the rights of state workers and weaken their unions by executive order is a blatantly illegal abuse of power,” said Roberta Lynch, executive director of Afscme Council 31. “Perhaps as a private equity C.E.O., Rauner was accustomed to ignoring legal and ethical standards, but Illinois is still a democracy and its laws have meaning. It is crystal clear by this action... that the governor’s supposed concern for balancing the state budget is a paper-thin excuse that can’t hide his real agenda: silencing working people and their unions who stand up for the middle class.”...

Some critics of the governor said it was clear why he had chosen to make an executive order rather than offer a legislative proposal. The state’s legislative chambers are controlled by Democrats, many of whom have received union support over the years. On Monday evening, the reaction from legislative leaders seemed surprisingly tempered.

Unlike Rauner, Wisconsin's governor, Scott Walker, had a Republican-controlled legislature in 2011 (and now). The Democrats in the Wisconsin legislature erupted in outrage alongside the protesters who stormed and besieged the our capitol back then. Why are the Illinois Democrats so calm?

“Our legal staff is reviewing the governor’s executive order regarding fair share,” said the [Illinois] Senate president, John Cullerton, a Democrat. “At the same time, I look forward to hearing the governor’s budget as we search for common ground to address our fiscal challenges.”

Explain the calmness: 1. The Democrats have the majority, so they'll be in control and need to plot a careful response, 2. The Democrats feel vulnerable in the next election cycle, and Rauner is shining a light on what actually is something of a "corrupt bargain... crushing taxpayers," and an intemperate reaction would make them look guilty, 3. They know the budget needs hard work, and they rather appreciate Rauner's taking the front line against the unions, 4. All of the above/something else?

ADDED: The above-linked article (in the NYT) doesn't explain Rauner's legal move. Here's the Chicago Tribune. Rauner needs that First Amendment argument to overcome what is otherwise a statutory obligation to withhold money from non-union employees and to send it to the unions. Rauner is filing a lawsuit in federal court, seeking a declaratory judgment about whether free speech rights trump that statute. You might think this legal issue was settled long ago, and that resolution has been that the "fair share" extracted from the non-union employees covers the union's collective bargaining efforts that benefit all employees. The non-union workers are not charged for the portion of the union's activity that is political speech. But:

"Not much annoys me more than the stereotype that to be liberal is to be full of guilt."

"To be socially liberal, in my view, is to be more mindful of compassion and empathy for others. On the basis of that compassion we choose to make lifestyle choices (taking public transport, boycotting Nestle, going vegetarian, donating to charity for example) and do our bit. But given that humans are full of contradiction between what they should do and what they want to do, there is always some conflict."

Wrote Sunny Hundal in a 2007 Guardian article titled "The guilt-free liberal." I'm looking into the topic of "liberal guilt" after my post earlier this morning in which I rejected Power Line's "liberal guilt" theory of why Brian Williams lied. I said:

I've spent decades deeply embedded among liberals and guilt just doesn't seem to be the central force in their psychology. "Liberal guilt" is some kind of meme among conservatives, and it doesn't resonate for me.

Meade questioned "Is 'liberal guilt' a conservative meme?" That got me searching. My report from decades of embedding amongst the liberals is that liberals think they are good, not bad. They feel like repositories of virtue — "mindful of compassion and empathy for others," as Hundal put it. They tend to guilt-trip conservatives, who are regarded as lacking compassion and empathy.

Meade and I also got into a conversation about the difference between "guilt" and "shame," which would take me a long time to pursue in a blog post, so I'll just quickly recall the anti-Walker protesters who endlessly shouted "Shame! Shame!" Conservatives were supposed to be ashamed of not caring enough about the plight of the unionized public employees. These protesters evinced no shame or guilt about themselves. They seemed to feel ultra-righteous.



That photograph of mine first appeared in a March 2011 post titled "Shame, shame, shame. Where is the shame?" ("Is it in wearing a gray hoodie under a tailored blazer, a little black derby hat, and a smelled-a-fart expression while carrying a pre-printed 'SHAME' sign when the guy marching after you is wearing a windbreaker and carrying a handmade 'TAX the RICH' sign?..."). "Shame!" — by the way — was #5 on my 2012 list of "Top 5 Wisconsin Protests That In Retrospect Sound Like Pro-Walker Protests Against the Protests."

Anyway, back to "liberal guilt." If you Google "liberal guilt," the top hit is a Wikipedia article, but it's not an article titled "Liberal guilt," it's an article titled "White guilt." And the second hit is a 2008 Slate article titled "In Praise of Liberal Guilt." The subtitle says a lot about what made the term "liberal guilt" go viral among conservatives: "It's not wrong to favor Obama because of race."

If you Google "liberal guilt" and "Obama," among the nearly 32,000 hits you get are a syndicated Charles Krauthammer column under the headline "Obama's Speech Plays On Liberal Guilt" [dead link, but this might be the column]; a Mark Steyn post [dead link] on the National Review Online that describes "a Democrat nominating process that's a self-torturing satire of upscale liberal guilt confusions" ; a column by self-styled "crunchy con" Rod Dreher, who suggests [dead link] the mainstream media coverage of Obama indicates that "liberal guilt will work [on them] like kryptonite." Even liberals make fun of liberal guilt. A couple of years ago, Salon coyly proposed [dead link] supplementing the Oscars with the Liberal Guilt Awards and awarding political dramas with "Guilties."

My working theory is that "liberal guilt" got traction as a race-neutral way to accuse people of voting for Obama out of "white guilt" and that the term metastasized into a way to impugn any liberal policy with the idea that it is not rational but emanating from someplace emotional. Of course, those who recast liberal guilt as compassion and empathy are conceding that their predilections come from an emotional place, but they are proud of that, not guilty (or ashamed). Many conservatives react to this prideful confession of emotion by asserting that conservative ideas come straight from the rational mind unclouded by emotion. In my view, that's the most emotive position of all, and I would recommend that conservatives present their ideas as grounded in compassion and empathy, as — obviously — some of them do.

Greg Orman explains the clown/clown car distinction to Bob Dole.

"I want to assure you that this is not true" — that Orman did not call the 91-year-old Kansan patriarch a clown — "and is not my opinion of you in any way, shape or form. My reference to a 'clown car' was commenting on the near-endless number of political supporters of Senator [Pat] Roberts who have piled out of Washington to support him, none of whom I think are clowns. I certainly wasn't calling you - or any of the others supporting Senator Roberts - a 'clown.'"

For some reason, this makes me want to show you this photo I took back in March 2011:



Originally blogged under the title: "Everybody wants to take a photo of a man wheeling the large pile of shit that has a 'Hello My Name Is Scott Walker' sign stuck in it." I'm thinking of saying something like: There, it's clear that the man means to say, Scott Walker is shit. He's not simply a man riding in on a shit wagon. He is a pile of shit, being wheeled around on a small vehicle that may or may not be specifically purposed as a shit wagon. And even if that were a shit wagon, it wouldn't mean that if any given person were to take a ride on the shit wagon, that would make him shit. When you take a hay ride on a hay wagon, that doesn't make you hay.

But then, who rides in a clown car other than clowns? And what makes a car a clown car aside from its being full of clowns? There's no specifically purposed vehicle known as a clown car. It's just a Volkswagen Beetle or some other such small car.

Now, I do get Orman's point. "Clown car" was a funny way to refer to a seemingly endless supply of surrogates that the GOP sent into Kansas to help Roberts, and there is something ludicrous about a candidate who depends too heavily on surrogates. So there's deniability. But, come on, Orman called Bob Dole a clown.  He handed Roberts a gift there, he knows it, and he had to walk it back. Ludicrously.

IN THE COMMENTS: CWJ said "Althouse, The candidate's name is Greg Orman not Gary." Corrected. Thanks. I must have confused him with Gary Oldman.



AND: Rejham said: "'Greg Orman, not Gary.' Ha! Gary Orman was great on Laugh-in though..." Oh, yeah. Gary Owens...

Mary Burke's use of the swastika in her ad does the very thing defenders of the ad will say she's accusing her antagonist of doing.

"Mary Burke hits Scott Walker in ad with swastika imagery," says the headline at the Washington Post.

Democrat Mary Burke released a new ad Friday accusing Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) of using a Republican county chairman's "lies to attack" her. The ad includes images of swastikas, it says, the county chair posted to his Facebook page.

Burke's ad seeks to tie Walker to Gary Ellerman, the Jefferson County Republican Party chairman and a former human resources director at Trek Bicycle, the Burke family company where the Democrat used to work.

Ellerman was quoted in a report on the conservative Web site Wisconsin Reporter that cited sources saying Burke was fired from the company. In the report, Ellerman said, “She was not performing. She was (in) so far over her head. She didn’t understand the bike business." Burke denies being fired.

You can watch the whole ad at the link, but here's a screen shot of the part where swastikas float across the screen and have whatever subliminal effect they're supposed to have:



There's writing on the screen, but are we supposed to read it or just have feelings that something awful is going on? If you're watching it on line, you can freeze it and read it, and if you do, you'll find swastikas used against Obama in exactly the same way swastikas were used against Scott Walker back in the 2011 protests, to say that a politician you oppose is like the Nazis.

Burke seems to be saying that Ellerman is bad because he used the swastika, and since Ellerman asserted something about Burke that could help Walker, Walker is connected to Ellerman, and Ellerman's form of expression should be attributed to Walker, making Walker bad.

If we had the time to read the words on the screen, it would be clear that Ellerman's use of the swastika is not pro- but anti-Nazi, but the ad doesn't give us that time, and in fact, the words on the graphic on the left never fully appear appear on screen. The most you ever see — and I had to freeze the frame to read this — is "cordance with the/Order, all Christian/-ches must hand over/-rmons regarding/-sexuality and gender/state so that we may/or and "correct" any/-rsive speech that/-dicts our Manifesto," a quote attributed to "-ton's Democrat Mayor, Annise Parker." The words "-sexuality and gender" line up with the eyes of the unfamiliar woman who is smirking and has her hands in what could be called the I-have-an-evil-plan position.



What subliminal effect does that have? One might, in so little time, subliminally read the "evil" woman as Mary Burke. And it is Mary Burke who is wafting swastikas in front of our eyes. I've seen anti-Walker protesters holding signs that put a swastika on Walker, so a casual viewer might think that's what Burke is doing here, even though she wants to say that's the kind of thing that Ellerman does. But most of us don't know or care about Ellerman any more than we know or care about Parker, so I think the subliminal effect — probably intended — was to make us think of Walker as a Nazi. That's something that Burke herself cannot say as a mainstream candidate, but it is something Walker-haters have been expressing for years.

At the 2011 protests, we saw many, many signs comparing Walker to Hitler. Meade and I frequently approached people who were holding these signs. Asked to explain, they always defended the comparison. Here's of photo of mine from February 2011:



I asked that woman behind the sign if she thought Scott Walker was like Hitler, and she said "Yes." So I followed up with: "Are you saying that you think fascism could come to America?" And she said, "It's what's happening." 

And then there was this woman, also from February 2011:



The expression on her face and the tone of her voice when she said "like Hitler" is something Meade and I have never forgotten. (Watch how quickly she otherizes Meade.)

Here's an "Adolf Walker" sign with a swastika.



Here's a young woman with a sign that says "Walker is a dictator" and has an image of Walker with a Hitler mustache. She says she "definitely" thinks Walker is like Hitler. Why? "He doesn't do nice things. He's not a nice person."



Meade follows up: "So, anyone who's not nice is like Hitler?" She tries again: "Well, no. He doesn't do what he should, doesn't do the right thing, and he's doing something that might ruin a lot of things for people. He's pretty much ruining, like, our future."

Meade offers: "You don't think that's over the top, that you're comparing him to Adolf Hitler?" She responds: "It might be a little over the top." Meade: "Just a little?" She makes the concession that might be perhaps what Gary Ellerman would say about Obama: "Just a little, but we kind of need to be dramatic in something like this."

An older woman cuts in and says: "It brings the point across." Meade: "And the point is?" Woman: "The point is this is a democracy, not a dictatorship." Meade asks whether there was something undemocratic about the election back in November, and she says: "Nothing. But what he's doing now is undemocratic." The woman continues, admitting that she didn't vote for Walker, but it's undemocratic because he's not "willing to compromise and negotiate... and that's what democracy is." That's what a lot of people thought about about Obama — quite aptly — when he said "I won" and foisted Obamacare on us when clearly there wasn't majoritarian support for it.

Now, you can see that the young and the older woman are nice people, not extremists, but aggrieved by the policies of the candidate who won the last election, and that they are appropriating a vivid graphic symbol for dramatic effect. Personally, I would not display a swastika as a way to make an exaggerated point about an American politician, but others do — on the right and on the left.

Obviously, I don't refrain from showing you that others are using a swastika in their form of expression, and you might say, that's exactly what Mary Burke is doing in her new ad.

But I am showing you things carefully, so you can study them, and to slow things down so there is no subliminal effect, no irrational roiling of the emotions. And that's exactly what Mary Burke is not doing. Her ad begins with a picture of Walker standing with "a Walker campaign worker and donor who puts pictures like this on his Facebook page." The image — my screen shot, above — slips by in 3 seconds, obliterating any hope of figuring out that Ellerman is not a Nazi fan and that he's just another Wisconsinite using dramatic imagery to get his point across.

Ironically, Burke's use of the swastika works exactly like Ellerman's, and she's doing the very thing defenders of the ad will say she's trying to criticize Ellerman for doing. Arguably, it's worse, because it's not a still image that you can gaze at until you understand. It means to creep in by the backdoor to your mind.

AND: From February 20, 2011: "Do you think Scott Walker deserves to be compared to the Nazis?"/"Yes, I do":



ALSO: I'd written "Annie Parker," but it's Annise Parker. Here's the story the swastika graphic was about:

The city of Houston has issued subpoenas demanding a group of pastors turn over any sermons dealing with homosexuality, gender identity or Annise Parker, the city’s first openly lesbian mayor. And those ministers who fail to comply could be held in contempt of court.