"The mere thought of tangling with the Trumpster’s foul, prevaricatory, sneering tweets offends Obama’s own sense of civil discourse between politicians."

"This revulsion is just another form of self-indulgence... It isn’t as if Barack Obama doesn’t realize what he is doing and what is happening in this self-enriching bubble he has shaped, post presidency.... He can’t seem to help himself."

Wrote Ralph Nader, quoted in "The far left’s attacks on moderate Democrats get old," by Paul Fanlund, editor of Madison's Capital Times.

"[T]he professors recommend that white-dominated newsrooms no longer cling to traditional standards of pure objectivity, but instead try something they call 'active objectivity.'"

Capital Time editor and executive publisher Paul Fanlund writes about UW–Madison journalism professors Sue Robinson and Kathleen Bartzen Culver:

“When white reporters cover issues involving race, they often fall back on traditional, passive voices of objectivity, such as deferring to official sources and remaining separate from communities,” they wrote.

Robinson and Culver contend there is an ethical tension between this neutral tone and the need to build trust in communities of color.... “An active objectivity remains committed to credible, verified facts and information, but adds educated interpretation.... Active objectivity calls for news organizations as institutions and journalists as individuals to detach from power, emphasize social, historical and cultural contexts in stories, question explicit and implicit biases, build trust among communities not often visited, and invest efforts over time to build relationships with people rather than go-to leaders.”...

Their conclusion was edgy: “Through their embrace of value-neutral and facts-only reporting, many Madison news outlets failed to build trust, diversify their sourcing, and tell the true stories of race....  A journalism that is loyal to citizens is a journalism of courage — of recognizing the disparities and concerns that plague some within our communities and carrying them forward to the attention of all"....

Is that edgy? It seems to me all the journalistic outlets already have activism within whatever objectivity they maintain. The question is the nature of the activism, and those who don't like that can push back by saying the journalism isn't properly objective enough or openly talk about what they don't like about the way the activism is going.

The journalism professors concentrated on reporting on a 2011 controversy over a charter school that was aimed at helping young African American male students. I wrote about that several times, including, here, "Madison school board votes down charter school designed to lift up poor minority kids."

"'Resentment' is the perfect one-word brand for the current political culture."

"In fact, Cramer, the traveling professor, is writing a book whose working title is: 'Understanding the Politics of Resentment'... 'I finally sent the revised manuscript back to my editor the Friday after the election,' she says. 'I was kind of joking to myself that if Scott Walker loses, I’m a little bit in a bind because I think I’ve gotten this wrong. But I think his win is sort of a continuation of what I had been hearing.'"

From "No end in sight to Wisconsin’s politics of resentment," by Paul Fanlund in The Capital Times. Cramer is Kathy Cramer,  "a youthful and charismatic political scientist from the University of Wisconsin," who "ventured from her Madison campus office to coffee shops and gas stations in small Wisconsin communities" and "struck up conversations uncovering a pattern of simmering resentment toward those of us in Madison and Milwaukee."

ADDED: The Cap Times doesn't seem to want us to get to that article. The proper link didn't work, and then a link going to a Google search didn't produce a workable link. And I'm down in the comments telling people to read the article and address the topic and don't just rehash Ferguson or whatever has rubbed you raw lately. All I can say is go to the home page of The Cap Times and see the article title there.

I'll think hard before linking to The Cap Times in the future. Do they see they are getting traffic from me and act to fend it off?

AND: Now, I think I've got a working link in the original post. Interestingly, the headline has changed! It's now "Ferguson makes us think about Madison’s black-white divide." Wow! That didn't seem to be the subject of the article to me, and I was annoyed that my commenters were turning it into another Ferguson discussion. That is bizarre!

The teaser on the front page is now: "Paul Fanlund: Ferguson makes us think about Madison’s black-white divide/Missouri firestorm elevates topic of relations between races here."

The article wasn't even mostly about race. It was about class politics.... at least the last time I read the text. Maybe the text is different too. I happened to blog this piece 12 minutes after it went up. Maybe they were still tweaking it, spiking it with click bait. What a sad place we're in with the media titillating us with Ferguson continually. What good do they hope to do! I'm sure there are at least a few lefties feeling bad that the effort to forefront class inequity is failing.

MORE: Now, I've figured out that the article with the Ferguson headline is a different article, also by Paul Fanlund, and it went up in the last hour. I'm thinking the original article I blogged has been pulled and that other article put in its place.

UPDATE: Commenter George Grady said "Google has a cached version of today's article, for now anyway," and I've now redone the first link with that, so it can be read. I can't believe I wasted so much time this morning on this article the Cap Times wafted momentarily. Talk about your "politics of resentment." I'm blogging pure resentment right here.

Is Scott Walker's "fixation" on Reagan "creepy"?

The Capital Times writer Paul Fanlund says so, as he identifies "3 Themes" in Scott Walker's just-published book "Unintimidated." The other 2 themes are "He throws even his allies under the bus" and "His egocentricity is just bizarre." This is the Cap Times, appealing its readership of Madison liberals who've been hating Walker for the last 3 years and have been hating Reagan even longer.

On the Reagan "fixation," there's Walker's annual Reagan birthday party (which is also the anniversary of his wedding to his wife Tonette). Here's how Walker describes the party in 2011, which was just before the big Wisconsin protests began.

[On] Saturday, February 12, Tonette and I hosted a dinner at the Executive Residence to celebrate the one hundredth anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s birthday. (I had been in Dallas to see the Packers win the Super Bowl on the sixth, his actual birthday, so we postponed the celebration by a week.) 

Meade and I were reading the book out loud together last night, and at that parenthetical, I said: "Oh, yeah, the protests blotted out all the great afterglow feeling we were having over winning the Super Bowl." That was sad!

Tonette and I host a dinner each year on Reagan’s birthday. We serve his favorite foods— macaroni and cheese casserole, and red, white, and blue Jelly Belly jelly beans— and have musicians perform patriotic songs and Irish music. 

Aw, come on. That's creepy?! That's incredibly sweet. Who gives a party and serves mac-and-cheese and jelly beans? It's beyond unpretentious, and it's just charming and nice. Why shouldn't Republicans celebrate Ronald Reagan, their modern-day icon? And I give Walker credit for putting the celebration on February 6th (or 12th) instead of March 30th (in the style of the Democrats, with their icon JFK (see Rule #8, here)).

It is a wonderful evening, and serves as a reminder for me each year to be hopeful and optimistic just like Ronald Reagan. It happens to be a dual celebration because President Reagan’s birthday is also our wedding anniversary. Tonette jokes that I never forget our wedding anniversary because it is Reagan’s birthday.

Well, isn't that a really low-key and generous way to make your anniversary something that's fun for other people you know? But for Fanlund, that's part of a creepiness profile.

Hey, Fanlund, ever consider whether you're creepy? Maybe Walker seems creepy to you because deep down you know the way you look at him is creepy.

Lecturing "left-leaning political pundits in Madison" about how "beating Scott Walker is the primary thing."

It's Paul Fanlund at the Capital Times telling them to shut up and get behind Mary Burke.

Good lord, this is a long piece! It takes a lot of words to say shhhh. Fanlund bemoans the "parlor games around process seem to trump pragmatism." The notion of a primary to pick the candidate is dismissed as "inside baseball and petty minutiae." Fanlund would like you to focus on "Walker, backed by ever-compliant GOP toadies in the Legislature, has morphed Wisconsin into a place where politics faces backwards; it’s ugly, mean-spirited, anti-women and anti-intellectual."

I love that he's promoting pragmatism and denouncing anti-intellectuals at the same time.

Today, at the University of Wisconsin—Madison, the law school presents a lecture by John Dean about Watergate, criminal law, and ethics.

That's later this afternoon. Meanwhile, here's a local media interview with Dean that engages him in some of the issues of the day. The interviewer Paul Fanlund invites Dean to attack today's Republicans with the prompt: "You wrote that book a few years ago and focused on politicians such as then-Vice President Cheney. But now the GOP looks ever more radical."

Dean says that 30% of Americans have a "personality trait" that some social psychologist he's talked to labels "authoritarianism," and that's now "the dominant force" driving Republican politics, which is why he and his friends — Dean lives in Beverly Hills — aren't Republicans anymore and also why Republicans are stuck with only 30% of the electorate. But Dean wonders "if the authoritarian people will ever get up to the 51 percent number because that would make a very different United States."

Unsuprisingly, Fanlund doesn't follow up with any questions about whether authoritarianism ever manifests itself in Democratic Party politics or whether some people with the authoritarian personality trait ever feel drawn into the hopes and dreams of left-liberal projects.

Fanlund's next question is a model of fawning and imprecision, the very opposite of what I'd want from a journalist: "You’ve done so much scholarship and have your first-hand experience. What do you think the future holds?"

Should Wisconsin Democrats go left to challenge Scott Walker?

Here's Paul Fanlund in the Capital Times fretting that Scott Walker-haters will be too mean to Mary Burke, the wealthy moderate who might run as a Democrat in next year's gubernatorial election.

Madisonians — including Police Chief Noble Wray — fret about the new concealed carry law in action.

Our local liberal rag, the Cap Times, displays and magnifies the worrying for its skittish readers.

What really trips Wray's trigger is the lack of a meaningful training requirement. Republican Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen prepared rules requiring four hours of training courses, but fellow Republicans thought even that low bar overly onerous and GOP Gov. Scott Walker agreed. Says Wray, "I thought four hours was a bare minimum," adding that almost all state law enforcement officials agree.

What exactly do you do for 4 hours? It seems as though the point of making it 4 hours was to deter people from exercising their rights. That is, it wasn't really to serve the state's legitimate interest in safety, but for the purpose or effect of placing a substantial obstacle in the path of the citizen who chooses to carry a gun. (Do you recognize the italicized words? Google them if you don't, especially if you enjoy irony, the exposure of hypocrisy, and fun stuff like that.)

Madison's concealed gun crowd has to be minuscule, I'd guess. After all, it's hard for me to imagine the biomolecular chemistry professor or the pediatric oncologist yearning to tote a concealed sidearm. So how many are seeking permits in Madison?

I love the smug elitism. Madison people are all professors and doctors. Not even just run-of-the-mill professors and doctors. We're a steaming mass of biomolecular chemistry professors and pediatric oncologists. It's those lowlifes from beyond the gleaming city's limits who want guns. Ugh! These benighted folk want to cling to some guns along with their religion. They don't belong here, just like that fiend Scott Walker and all the Republicans in the legislature don't belong here. They are bringing their what's-the-matter-with-Wisconsin values to our beautiful city!

The author of the Cap Times piece — Paul Fanlund — tries to find out how many Madisonians there are among the the 67,000 who have applied for permits and is surprised to learn that it's illegal to disclose that information. Law-abiding gun owners actually have privacy interests the state wants to protect. What a surprise! But it would be so interesting to know what loathsome, Republican-voting communities they came from. Surely not the teeming-with-physicists-and-oncologists Madison!

Fanlund quotes Chief Wray:

"What I can't understand is how come we have not evolved beyond the point that the best way to protect ourselves is a gun? How come we cannot come up with something that is less destructive and less permanent."

I don't know, Chief. I'm pretty evolved myself, being a Madisonian professor, but I don't know. I do have a question for you though: Why haven't the police — the police you lead — eliminated crime in our neighborhoods? Why are there still rapes and robberies? Why are there still gangs? Why haven't your police evolved to the point where you have solved these problems for us? Because, I know that I, personally, would love to depend on government for all my personal protection. How come you cannot come up with something?

"Even allies backpedal from Walker's extremism" says a headline in the Madison newspaper The Capital Times.

This is a political analysis piece written by the newspaper's editor Paul Fanlund, and I just can't figure out how the headline is justified. The piece begins with a cite to the NYT Magazine's profile of Chris Christie, which got me running over there to find out what Christie said about Walker. The author of that piece — Matt Bai — discusses Walker:

Now a new class of governors from both parties is promising to revisit union contracts in order to put their states on firmer fiscal ground. In Wisconsin, Scott Walker, an aggressive new Republican governor, just proposed legislation that would limit the rights of public workers to collectively bargain. “You can’t have one group who are the haves,” Walker told me recently, meaning government workers, “and one group, the private-sector workers, who are the have-nots.” Walker’s move led to protests in Madison, drawing President Obama into the debate and raising the prospect of French-style labor uprisings among public workers across America.

In part, the viral movement against public-sector unions is a result of political necessity. In states all over the country, balancing the budget has become an annual exercise in Copperfield-like illusion...

I don't see Christie backing away from Walker.

(And as for Matt Bai's "drawing President Obama into the debate" — I think Obama is keeping his distance!)