Politics is local, and "Gov. Walker serves up meal at local farm event."

This is Scott Walker at "Breakfast on the Farm" in Sheboygan. Don't miss the slide show, especially photo #5, which I'd like to caption: Stirring the shit.

Anyway... part of the meal Gov. Walker served up was some quotes about the recent document dump by the order of the federal court in the civil rights case against the prosecutors in the John Doe investigation:

“The folks [have said] over and over again, ‘Hang in there, we’re behind you, we support you,’” said Walker.

Asked about the documents that attracted mainstream media headlines about his central position in a "criminal scheme" and the supposedly important email he sent to Karl Rove, Walker said:

"That email’s pretty straight forward.... I was helping get the message out about what the senators did as they were heading into recalls and that’s completely legal."...

"I think in the end, people are going to see that despite the initial reaction, the bottom line is that what we’ve done is completely legitimate and right."

So, that's Walker in Sheboygan. But Walker's also doing national mainstream media — if Fox News counts as mainstream — here, last Friday on "Fox and Friends":



Here's the transcript, at Poltifact, which does a fact check and declares it "false." See if you can find the falsehood:

"You’ve had not one but two judges -- a state judge and a federal judge; a state judge (who is) a well-respected court of appeals judge, and a federal judge more recently -- have both looked at this argument. And in the past, not just recently -- remember this is not new news, it’s just newly released yesterday because documents were opened -- but no charges, case over.

Both judges said they didn’t buy the argument. They didn’t think that anything was done that was illegal, and so they’ve gone forward and not only said, we don’t buy it, they actually shut the case down, both at the state and at the federal level.

So, many in the national media and even some here in Wisconsin are looking at this (case) backwards. This is a case that’s been resolved, that not one but two judges have said is over. And we’re just learning about it because it became open in a document yesterday. But there is no argument there."

See it? "Resolved." There is only a preliminary injunction in the federal civil rights lawsuit against the John Doe prosecutors and it is before the appellate court right now,  so it depends on how you resolve the meaning of the word "resolved." The John Doe proceeding is enjoined, but if the civil rights plaintiffs (the targets in the John Doe proceeding) lose on appeal, it is conceivable that, if freed from the federal court injunction, and if the state court case is also eliminated as an obstacle, the prosecutors (the defendants in the federal court case) might resume the investigation.

How dead must the investigation be before Walker's entitled to use the word "resolved"?

Ask the folks in Sheboygan!

Let's see Walker opponents get out there in the state and assail Walker for the outrageous deception of using the word "resolved" to refer to the state and federal court interventions thus far.

Meanwhile, I'm here in Madison, being a professor in the law school, and my instinct is to look up the word "resolve" in the (unlinkable) Oxford English Dictionary. The verb "resolve" comes from the Latin word resolvere, which means "to loosen, undo, unfasten, to unravel, solve, to unbind, to release, to separate into components, break up, to reduce to liquid, melt, dissolve, to soften, reduce to pulp, to make less tense, relax, to weaken the nerves of, paralyse, to make less strict or disciplined... to put an end to, finish, settle, to cancel, nullify, to refute, rebut...."

The oldest meanings of the word have to do with liquefaction, dissolving, melting, softening, and decomposing, and unbinding. The OED has 26 definitions for the verb "resolve," many with multiple subparts, so you'll have a hell of a time trying to pin Walker with that one word.

The set of meanings that seem most apt in this context has to do with unbinding: "To untie; to answer, solve; to decide, determine," especially "To answer (a question); to solve (a problem of any kind); to determine, settle, or decide upon (a point or matter regarding which there is doubt or dispute)." For example, from Henry Fielding's "Tom Jones": "Whether Mrs. Honour really deserved that Suspicion... is a Matter which we cannot indulge the Reader's Curiosity by resolving."

Have I resolved the meaning of "resolve"? I'm only trying to loosen it up and liquefy it, so that perhaps it looks like whatever it is those farmers are stirring in Sheboygan in photo #5. Because I'm here in Madison, cloistered in the academy, where we should delight in stirring the shit, and nothing can ever be fully resolved. Why, we've been talking for 500 years about "O that this too too sallid flesh would melt, Thaw and resolue it selfe into a dewe."

This John Doe business melted and thawed, it's resolving, and it has resolved itself into — if not quite yet a dew — a doo.

Adieu. It's Breakfast on the Farm time in Wisconsin.