"Readers... speculated about the love lives of such local figures as conservative blogger Ann Althouse, charming NBC 15 anchor Leigh Mills and scandalous Olympic runner Suzy Favor Hamilton...."

"State politics weighed heavily on readers’ minds over the past decade, even in the context of an advice column. A liberal woman felt guilty about her dreams of having sex with Gov. Scott Walker...."

The Isthmus advice columnist signs off after 10 years of answering questions from Madisonians.

A link is provided to the one about me, "Should UW law prof Ann Althouse marry her commenter Meade?"

IN THE COMMENTS: I wrote...

How do I get to be "conservative"? By being looked at by left-wingers.

When actual conservatives look at me, I never get to be a conservative.

I'm always the other.

... and I left myself open to misinterpretation. Many readers thought I was asking for directions, as if "How do I get to be 'conservative'?" was like "Do you know the way to San Jose?"

I am not writing this blog with the aim of getting perceived as conservative. I am writing to be free, and one of the things I most want to be free of is the obligation to ensure that I am perceived as liberal. The Isthmus is part of the disciplinary apparatus of a kind of liberalism that isn't worth the name. They labeled me "conservative" to hurt me for choosing freedom, to make an example out of me.

"I can't help noticing that Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker picks beautiful young women to be the spokespeople for his administration and his campaigns."

"By my count there's Laurel Patrick, Alleigh Marré, Jocelyn Webster and Ciara Matthews. Matthews, you recall, is the one who made headlines for being a former Hooters waitress. It reminds me of Fox News, which uses super-sexy women as on-air talent rather than a normal range of women who just happen to be good journalists. As with Fox, it's hard to believe that the most talented females available to fill Walker's frontline jobs also look like models.... What does it say to the young girls of Wisconsin who hope to do important work when they grow up, regardless of their looks? In my opinion Walker's approach sets women back 50 years, to the pre-feminist Mad Men era."

A letter to the "Tell All" column in the Madison, Wisconsin alternative newspaper Isthmus.

Here's an article in the Cap Times from 2012 about Matthews: "Walker's Hooters connection and other fun facts about campaign spokeswoman Ciara Matthews."

“Are you guys doing a story on this, really?” she asked Friday when asked to confirm the rumor.

But to the direct question: Were you a Hooters girl? She said, “I was.”

Matthews said she waited tables for the popular restaurant chain -- which features tasty chicken wings and waitresses in short shorts and low-cut tops –- while attending college at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas.

“So you guys want to write a story that I waited tables in college,” she said. “I’m confused as to why that’s a story.”

Imagine taking a shot at a young woman for waitressing?

ADDED: Back in 2009, somebody wrote to Isthmus "Tell All" with this thing about me:

"I believe Gov. Walker would prefer if this became another red vs. blue fight because polarization will make him look strong in Iowa, and polarized fights are fights he knows he can win."

"If he didn't want protests, why else would he actively talk about getting rid of shared governance; why else would his staff attempt to remove the Wisconsin Idea from the UW's mission? Both of those are throwing gasoline on a fire, an attempt to stop Democrats and Republicans from talking because talking just might lead to a better solution."

Paranoia strikes deep.

"We truly thought it would only take a few years to remind the nation of America's secular roots, and that reason would prevail and we could get on with our lives."

Said  Annie Laurie Gaylor, co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, quoted in an Isthmus article with a subtitle that puzzles me: "The nation's largest group of freethinkers strives to improve the image of atheists."

This slow trickle of religion into one-prohibited places [sic] creates a slippery slope that Gaylor fears could bottom out in a full-blown theocratic society. Fundamentalist Protestant groups and Roman Catholics are the top offenders pushing for a government governed by God, she says.

"These denominations may invoke state-church separation by crying it's being violated when they don't like a government action, such as Obamacare's contraception mandate," she says. "But they essentially believe in theocracy and believe their religious dogma should be legislated in our laws. They want to tell the government what to do so it conforms to their doctrines."

Is "freethinker" a term of art? I looked it up in the Oxford English Dictionary and found a single definition: "A person who professes to or is known for independence of thought, esp. one who withholds assent to widely held beliefs or ideas; spec. a person who refuses to submit his or her reason to the control of authority in matters of religious belief; (chiefly with capital initials) any of the rationalists, prominent from the early 18th cent., who rejected Christianity on the grounds of reason (now hist.)." Among the historical examples of the usage of this word:

1708   Swift Sentiments Church of Eng.-man i, in Misc. (1711) 100   The Atheists, Libertines, Despisers of Religion..that is to say, all those who usually pass under the Name of Free-Thinkers....
1836   H. Smith Tin Trumpet I. 227   Freethinker..has come to be synonymous with a libertine and a contemner of religion....
1968   A. J. Ayer Humanist Outlook 4   Present-day humanists are in fact the intellectual heirs of those nineteenth-century free-thinkers.

Mary Burke supporters worry about how she'll do in the debates with Scott Walker.

A discussion at the very intra-Madison, intra-lefty forum at Isthmus. One commenter breaks up the good feeling within the group:

I'm just hoping Burke does better at the debates then she does when asked unscripted questions. It's all very fun to make fun of Walker and act like he's an idiot, but he's been a professional politician for about 20 years now. He knows how to publicly debate political issues. I'm not sure Burke has that skill yet and her inability to answer the plagiarism question was not very reassuring.

That last bit refers to this. Another commenter, local politico Stu Levitan, draws a warm bath for the group:

I thought Mary did really well on For The Record last weekend. I think she'll do fine in the debates.

For The Record! "For the Record" is a local Madison show that reflects local Madison values, where Mary Burke sat down for comfortable chat with 2 friendly reporters. Here, you can watch the show.

"For the Record" has invited Scott Walker to do the show too. It's not surprising he's declined.

MEANWHILE: Michelle Obama was back in Wisconsin, campaigning with Mary Burke, this time in Madison.

"If it weren't Wisconsin 2014, I would think that site was a parody trying to make the right wing look bad."

"However, the unfortunate truth is that Wisconsin Republicans and their supporters really are that lame."

Hot comment threads in Madison, Wisconsin.

Over at the Isthmus forum, where Madisonians nestle together and give comfort to one another, they're running up the numbers in a thread titled "Bush and Hitler comparisons."

"I jokingly refer to OkCupid as the Man Catalog. Clicking through profiles feels like sifting through the pages of the latest fall trends."

"Oh, that 35-year-old who plays the mandolin would look great sitting next to me at the Weary Traveler; and that blue-eyed 30-year-old who likes to cook, he'd pair well with my appetite for Italian food."

From an Isthmus article titled "Looking for love online: Is Madison's singles pool big enough for dating success?"

"Will de Blasio's promise to let developers build larger and taller in exchange for creating affordable housing overwhelm neighborhoods with hulking buildings that hurt the quality of life?"

That's what "some advocates and preservationists" are asking.

I think if you click through and look at the design, you'll scream yes.

If the developers want people to accept huge buildings, why do they make them so ugly?

Here's Madison's little big-building controversy, as presented by our former mayor Dave Cieslewicz. Don't miss the comments section, with much participation by Stu Levitan, who leads the Landmark Commission that rejected the proposal. ("This column is a disgrace, and shows a shocking disregard for both facts and the laws....")

Here's some background on Levitan, an article that ends, "'Yes, I still have Nixon’s balls,' Stu Levitan said. 'Thanks for asking.'"

I've mentioned Levitan before on this blog, for example in the post "'So Meade, in your marriage, which one of you is the whore?' A question asked in the webpages of Isthmus by Madison politico Stu Levitan." That was back before Meade got blocked from participating in the Isthmus forum for speaking inappropriately. (Isthmus is the Madison alt newspaper, i.e., the main newspaper in Madison. And here's an old post of mine that records ex-Mayor Dave's interaction with Meade at the Isthmus.)

ADDED: Clicking around writing this post, I got to this old piece of Dave's that has Meade in the comments, and I see that Stu Levitan is also in the comments there. Dave's topic is college football, and Meade, commenting with his full name, Laurence Meade, writes:

It's a free market, Dave. Plenty of schools don't have sports. Go to one of those schools.

As far as brain injuries, what else are you going to ban - riding in cars? bicycling? taking showers? drinking alcohol?

"Is the city of Madison great and/or the 'most racist' in the U.S.?"

Headline in our local alternative newspaper, Isthmus.

"Countercultural in these times means conservative."

"Fred is off the central planner’s grid; the antipode of the collective, an unroped stray escaped from the herd. Milverstedt is a freelance freedom fighter battling the steady encroachment of Bloomberg’s nanny state. From this remove, the man’s two major vices are power and speed. He expresses those vices through the language of two powerful machines: semi-automatic firearms and overpowered motorcycles. Who else would email JPEGs of his tight target grouping? Or extol the virtues of his AR-15?! That, my friends, is the difference between liberals and us conservatives. We brag on our vices; the progs apologize for theirs, then legislate reparations."

Excerpt from David Blaska's post about Fred Milverstedt, one of the co-founders of the Madison alternative newspapers, Isthmus, which I used to link to more than I do these days (now that Meade never comments there anymore). Milverstedt left Isthmus long ago, and one thing he's done since then is write a book: "One More Ride: Fred and the Craft of Motorcycle Meditations."

Sample book text:

If there ever was a time on the bike when I really thought I might need a gun, it was a day when Barbi and I were out on the Shadow on a high ridge in western Wisconsin overlooking a series of lesser hills rolling away to the south. We’d stopped, parked the bike on the shoulder and got off to admire the view.

We were on State 33, not an untraveled road but a good piece from the New York Thruway. On this stretch, there was no other traffic, no other people, no houses or barns except those dotting the valleys below.

Around the curve comes a pick-up truck, slowing as it moves into sight. It stops next to us, not on the shoulder but the middle of the road. There’s two young guys inside.

Seldom one to make snap judgments, give or take now and then, I make one here.

These guys are crackers....

"I’ll still keep up an online presence, particularly on Twitter.... I find it calmer than Facebook."

Writes Kenneth Burns, the erstwhile Isthmus writer (who's moved to Tennessee). He's deactivating Facebook at least for the summer.

Mainly, I’m weary of the politics. Understand, I’m fascinated by electoral politics, like any journalist. I have my views, and I express them in the polling booth and not many other places. Not on Facebook. I’m not interested in politics as an all-consuming leisure activity.

In my experience, though, Facebook is one rabidly political social network, and it’s not political in inspiring ways. It’s political in reductive, repetitive ways.

But why has his Facebook experience been so rabid and uncalm compared to Twitter? He's got himself to blame:

"Wisconsin's leather community finds brotherhood and kink at International Mr. Leather 2013."

It took me way too long to figure out whether this Isthmus article was about an actual beauty pageant or a fictional theater piece about a pageant — like "Smile" or "Miss Firecracker" or "Little Miss Sunshine."

It drives me crazy — this journalism style of withholding the who-what-when so we can ease into the story with quotes and anecdotes. Is the assumption that we want to read it before we know what it's about or that we wouldn't want to read it if we knew what it was about?

"The Giving Tree" — "Remember that book - written in the early 60's by Satanist, Anton LaVey?"

"The story follows the lives of a female apple tree and a male human who are able to communicate with each other; the racist kingdomist tree addresses the human as 'Boy' his entire life. In his childhood, the boy enjoys playing with the tree, climbing her trunk, swinging from her branches, and eating her apples. However, as time passes the tree becomes mean, jealous, and stingy...."



ADDED: Reading that Meadepost, I made the association — for the first time — between the Xs on the eyes that signify death in the language of comics and the XX signifying the female in the world of chromosomes.

A Madison, WI proposal to authorize community street painting projects to "bring people together."

We're not talking about water soluble paint, but permanent paint jobs, the equivalent of murals, but on the horizontal surface that cars drive on. The alderwoman who proposes the new ordinance — Marsha Rummel — got the idea from Portland, Oregon, "where community members paint an intersection to give it a sense of place and create a public square."

There would be a permit process, including a petition "indicating approval from at least 60 percent residents, businesses and non-residential properties within a 200-foot radius of the proposed location"  and "assurances for the city that hold the design's applicant responsible for maintenance of the painting and requires them to have insurance." (I'm quoting the Cap Times article, not the ordinance, so I don't know whom to blame for the irritating ambiguity.)

"You can't just say you want to come in and do this. It needs to be maintained over time. Paint fades. It needs to be repainted from time to time, just as we go and repaint traffic lines," said Arthur Ross, the city's pedestrian-bicycle coordinator.

Which is why it's obviously a terrible idea.

"What it really is is a community building activity. It gets people out of their houses and working on something together," Ross said.

And what about when it breaks them apart because it's ugly, it makes the neighborhood look trashy, and it's not properly maintained.  I loathe these government dreams of bringing people together. Leave us alone! I know it's Madison, but people have their own private ways of getting together.

"We're all trolls."

Writes Meade (at the Isthmus forum): "This very thread, started by someone who hides behind his troll name, fisticuffs, is an example of spiteful trollery. The question is: do you want to be an affable interesting troll - like Meade - or do you want to be a grumpy old ill-humored boring troll? Like Galoot or fisticuffs."

"John Doe probe of Scott Walker office closed with no new charges."

"Sorry for anyone who got their hopes up."

The 301st post in a thread titled "John Doe probe of Walker makes another move." I don't have the energy to comb through the whole thing looking for the most egregious bloodlust, but I'm glad to see it's over.

ADDED: "Out of the left oozed a mixture of disappointment, bitterness and indignation."

Scott Walker proposes expanding the school voucher program beyond Milwaukee and Racine...

... to 9 new districts, including — gasp! — Madison.

Here's what Walker said last night in his budget speech:

For communities where some schools fail to meet expectations, we include an expansion of the parental choice program in this budget. Since wealthy families have a choice because they can pay to send their children to a private school, we give low income and middle class families an opportunity to also choose a viable alternative for their sons and daughters.

Interestingly, some communities have both high-performing schools, as well as some that fail to meet expectations. Green Bay is a good example. Keller Elementary in Green Bay is a school where more than 70 percent of students are economically disadvantaged, yet Keller Elementary exceeds expectations. In this budget, schools like this will be eligible for a performance reward. At the same time, in that same district, there are other schools that fail to meet expectations. Other districts like Madison, Beloit, Sheboygan, and West Allis/West Milwaukee have similar situations.

People in Madison like to think we have fabulous public schools, so it's rough seeing Madison grouped with those other places. And of course, people in Madison tend to loathe Governor Walker. Obviously, the liberal viewpoint is that if there's a problem with the public schools, more money should be given to those public schools, not diverted into private schools. Here's the discussion in the forum over at the Isthmus, where liberal Madisonians tend to talk amongst themselves (and where Meade injects a bit of the kind of diversity they don't celebrate). I love the way the separation-of-church-and-state topic is playing out. First:

Does it bother you that taxpayer money will be spent for sectarian religious instruction?

Someone else:

If my kid went to a school with overcrowded classrooms and wasn't getting the attention he or she needed for whatever reason, I wouldn't hesitate sending him to a Catholic school if I could for free. Would you? Would you put up with a crappy classroom just because you didn't want your kid to take a half-hour of Bible study each day? I don't know many parents who would in a similar situation....

A third person (boldface added):

I don't think anybody's really upset about vouchers to send kids to Catholic schools. The Catholic schools can't take many more kids, but they are run by local parishes and nuns with good intentions and without a profit motive. It's not foremost a constitutional issue but a quality one. We're upset about a bunch of profit-motive business types setting up private schools to make money for themselves by providing services that work poorly and exploit public funding the same way the University of Phoenix does with adult students. Why anybody thinks replacing so-called overpaid teachers with overpaid executives is an improvement beats me. And that's exactly what we'll get if we don't guard against it at every turn.

The lefties really hate business! Meade provides the comic pushback. Quoting "bunch of profit-motive business types":

But enough about the teachers' unions. School choice is coming to Madison. Choice is good.

"I successfully edited Wikipedia!"

Meade exclaims. It's his first time. It was over there in the page on The Gettysburg Address (which I linked to earlier today, as perhaps you noticed). His edit is in the third paragraph, which, before his edit, read:

Beginning with the now-iconic phrase "Four score and seven years ago," referring to the Declaration of Independence during the American Revolution in 1776, Lincoln examined the founding principles of the United States in the context of the Civil War, and memorialized the sacrifices of those who gave their lives at Gettysburg and extolled virtues for the listeners (and the nation) to ensure the survival of America's representative democracy, that the "government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

Meade took out the "the" before that last quote. Have you ever noticed that there's no "the" before "government" (even as there is a "the" before each of the 3 "people"s)?

... we here highly resolve... that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Do you see what a big difference a "the" would make in that sentence? Meade had gotten into a back-and-forth over at the Isthmus forum (a site dominated by typical Madisonians, i.e., left/liberals).

"So Meade, in your marriage, which one of you is the whore?"

A question asked in the webpages of Isthmus by Madison politico Stu Levitan.

Non-Madisonians may not know the name, but: "Stu Levitan has been a mainstay of Madison media and government for thirty-five years, a leader in both politics and the press since 1975. In addition to Books and Beats, Stu hosts Access: City Hall on the Madison City Channel and serves as chair of the Madison Community Development Authority and on the Madison Landmarks Commission. Since 1987, he has been a mediator/arbitrator for the Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission."

Scroll up at the first link for the context, which is a discussion, initiated by Levitan, about the discovery that Madison sports heroine Suzy Favor Hamilton has been working as a call girl.