A 14-year-old girl speaks at the Tea Party rally in Madison and is drowned out by chants, boos, and cowbells.

This video — shot by Meade and edited by me — begins with a little boy banging on a plastic bucket "drum." A man with a guitar is performing — amplified — on the stage, but we can barely hear him over the crowd noise. There is incessant ringing of cowbells. Then, we can hear that a young woman is speaking from the stage to the Tea Party crowd as the protesters do what they can to drown her out. She finishes — "God bless America" — and the tea partiers cheer but the protesters overwhelm them with boos. The emcee comes to the mike and we hear that the speaker was only 14 years old.

ADDED: One of the chants during her speech is "Go home! Go home! Go home!"

UPDATE: Another angle on the heckling of this girl, at 1:07 in a montage of video that I shot yesterday.

"I can see stupid from here."

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"Refudiate Palin!"/"Sarah & Scott/Corporate Whores."


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"Sarah — You can't see Russia from WI. Go Home!"


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"Why Am Eye Here."


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Go here to see all 85 photos from today's rally at the Wisconsin Capitol. (The fisheye photos are by Meade, and the rest are mine.)

"Madison, these are the front lines in the battle for the future of our country," said Sarah Palin.

"This is where the line has been drawn in the sand, and I am proud to stand with you today in solidarity.... The 2012 election begins here."

The NYT highlights that quote and says:

... Ms. Palin’s appearance offered one early hint at Wisconsin’s rising significance in the presidential race ahead. The place has long been a battleground, politically divided, but what seems clear here now is that voters are especially energized, and that offers tantalizing prospects — on both sides.

How animalistic, frenzied, loud, rude, and desperate was the Wisconsin Capitol today?

"Andrew Breitbart confronts an angry union mob in Wisconsin," Says Instapundit, quoting Breitbart, who goes on about how ugly the "mob" was today at the Capitol:

[T]he defeats that the union’s leadership have suffered in that time have plunged these losers into an even more animalistic state of frenzy. Still stinging from last week’s election reaffirmation of Gov. Scott Walker’s policy of requiring public sector unions to face some of the economic realities that the rest of us have to deal with, the counter protesters both homegrown and bussed in them were louder, ruder and more desperate than ever....

Whoa! Breitbart's last trip to Madison was February 19th, the first Saturday of the protests, and things were pretty mellow then. But if you've been going to the protests all along, you would never think today was "an even more animalistic state of frenzy" or "louder, ruder and more desperate than ever"! Both Meade and I were saying that the crowd today was... pretty mellow! It's all relative. You should have been here on March 9th, when protesters stormed the Capitol. And some of those days when people were occupying the Capitol were surreal.

But today was distinctive because it was a Tea Party rally, and many people wanted to hear the speakers, especially Sarah Palin. The counter-protesters were there to drown out those speakers. Their earlier anti-Walker protests were about how they wanted to be heard. Over the last 2 months, the anti-Walker protesters have said many times — often directly to me or Meade — that they felt the GOP governor and legislators had the obligation to listen to them, that it was terribly wrong for their voices to be excluded, and that dialogue is the essence of democracy. They made a godawful noise saying that (and more), but what they did today was hypocritical, because today they showed up for the express purpose of denying other people the right to listen. So today was loud and angry, but it was nowhere near as loud and angry as it has been on other days. Nevertheless, today was bad in a different way, a way that betrayed values the anti-Walker protesters had voiced many, many times.

Back to Breitbart:

As I took to the stage, the shouting from those trying to disrupt the Tea Party intensified. Inarticulate shouting becomes their last weapon as their policies crumble. 

The shouting was actually much worse when they thought they could affect the policy. The passage of the bill and Kloppenburg's loss have toned things down.

I thought of the hypocritical calls for civility amidst the dishonestly cynical opportunism of blaming Sarah Palin who shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. 

I never took the calls for civility seriously in the first place, but I have seen so much incivility in the last 2 months that the subject rarely crosses my mind anymore. Maybe Breitbart got his hopes up about civility back in January when Obama made his speech after the Tucson massacre. But I think Breitbart's bringing it up because he's being criticized today for yelling "go to hell" at the protesters (which, you've got to admit, isn't super-nice). If Breitbart signed on to the civility deal, then I can see why he wants to bring it up for the purpose of saying he had the right to punch back since they hit first.

What Meade fisheyed at the Tea Party/anti-Tea Party protest.

A man in a Reagan mask says "Tear down this WALLker," while a man in a Mad Hatter costume says "The Mad Hatter called/He wants his Tea Party back."


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A man and woman in colonial costume. The sign says "The REAL Tea Party was about lack of representation & revolt against corporate greed," and the tea kettle has a label that reads "Walker's Kool-aid."


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A man has a sign that reads "Imagine Taxing the Rich," and a woman with a blindfold that says "Fox" holds a sign (in her skeleton-gloved hands) that says "Blinded by the Right."


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And here are 2 pro-Scott Walker guys:


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What we saw of Sarah Palin... while mostly surrounded by protesters who tried to shout her down.

(Video by Meade. I appear briefly. If you notice a gray-gloved hand, that's mine.)

"The margin [of Prosser's victory] - 0.488% - is within the 0.5% limit that would allow Kloppenburg to request a statewide recount at taxpayers' expense."

There is a reason why the law draws the line at 0.5%, and JoAnne Kloppenburg ought to ask herself whether she should take advantage of getting in just under the line or whether she should see 0.48% as so close to that line that the same reason really does apply. There is the letter of the law and the spirit of the law, and this is a test of character. Ms. Kloppenburg would do well now to give a gracious concession speech.

Raw video of today's counter-protest to the tea party rally at the Wisconsin Capitol.

Video by me. I'll have some edited stuff in a while. This was shot before the speakers came on. Emphasis on noisemakers... and dogs.

"Tea Party: How About a Nice Cup of... SHUT THE F@*K UP!"

"This Cheese Does Not Run":



"Dream Utopia":



"Palin + Walker/No Morals/Media Whores/Faux News/Ego Driven/No Empathy/War on the Poor/Unite to Take Back Our State and Country" (and in the background: "If you expect to be served HONEY with your CORPORATE TEA you're in the WRONG PLACE"):



A woman looks askance at a woman:



"Shame!"



(All pics taken by me, this afternoon, at the Tea Party rally at the Wisconsin Capitol in Madison, Wisconsin. You can click through to enlargements.)

At the Tea Party rally in Madison, Wisconsin, Sarah Palin said: "I feel like I'm at home."

Because it's ridiculously cold and snowing.

We're back home, uploading video and photos. I'll have something up soon.

There was a good crowd, especially considering the weather. There were plenty of tea party people and even more counter-protesters. The counter-protesters were intent on drowning out the tea party speakers — especially Sarah Palin — with bells, whistles, and drums and with chants. The chant "Shame! Shame! Shame! Shame!" was predominant.

Isn't this "kind of like sending Anthony Perkins to jail for killing Janet Leigh in the shower?"

No. It's like Anthony Perkins going to jail for harassing Janet Leigh after he pled guilty to avoid a trial for murder.

"[T]he less we hear about the birth certificate from this point forward, the better chances I gather that this is real."

Says Mediate, summarizing Trump's interview with Rush Limbaugh. (17-minute audio at the link.)

The conversation broached many subjects and, while it was a good interview, perhaps the most interesting note is what they didn’t talk about. Not once during the call did the subject of President Obama’s birth come up. Trump’s investigators in Hawaii must feel so insulted.

Mediate doesn't realize that this was Trump's second interview on Rush's show. I can't get the search function on RushLimbaugh.com to work anymore for some reason, but the previous interview was a couple weeks ago, and they did go through the whole birther thing then.

My impression, from listening to both Rush-Trump interviews, is that Trump's main issue is the way the Chinese are hurting American business interests (including Trump's own interests). On yesterday's show, this was Trump's most passionate moment:

Sarah Palin to speak at the tea party rally at the Capitol today.

The Wisconsin State Journal reports in a tiny article the bulk of which promotes the counter-protest:

The scene at the Wisconsin state Capitol could be a wild one on Saturday....

Liberal leaders still smarting from the bruising fight over Republican Gov. Scott Walker's collective bargaining law are mobilizing a counter-rally. They're urging people to show up with puppets to underscore accusations Walker and Palin do corporations' bidding. They also want people to bring cowbells and sleigh bells.

I get the feeling the WSJ is hoping the locals here in Madison will drown out the speaker with noisemakers.

Meade and I will be there to monitor the possibly wild scene. It's cold, gray, and rainy here in Madison, and I felt bad that it would rain on Sarah, then I remembered Sarah Palin camping in the rain on her TV show. Sarah is good in the rain.

"Trump becomes the 'new Sarah Palin.'"

Headlines the Quad-City Times.

Time for him to get a better wig. ← requisite Trump hair joke. (Surely, you can do better.)

"Universities have long told the larger culture that it must simply put up with whatever is said, however offensive, in the interest of free expression."

"Now we see more evidence that that was always a lie, a self-serving cover story that was really meant simply to protect speech that the larger culture didn’t want to hear, with no intention to protect speech that people at universities don’t want to hear. Universities, meanwhile, have become some of the most hostile environments for free speech anywhere in America."

ADDED: "Is Yale University Sexist?"

What is really at stake in the current investigation of Yale is the proper mission of the university. The complainants, not a few university administrators and faculty, and powerful forces at work in the Department of Education seem to think that one of a university's top priorities is policing students' opinions and utterances to ensure that they adopt government-approved ideas about sexual relations. That priority can't be reconciled with the imperatives of a liberal education.

California already requires its public schools to teach women's history and black history, so why not gay history?

There's a bill in the state legislature that has already passed the senate.

Advocates say that teaching about gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people in schools would prevent bullying and shatter stereotypes that some students may harbor. They point to several students who have committed suicide after being taunted by peers for being gay. But the bill has drawn vociferous criticism from opponents who argue that when and how to talk about same-sex relationships should be left to parents.

So the motivation behind forcing this study of history has little to do with history. It's about controlling behavior.

I have this idealistic belief that young people would behave better if they were respected as students, if the study of history would be premised on the value of studying history, and if, when history is studied,   historical principles determined the subject matter. 

A similar bill was approved by the Democratic-controlled Legislature in 2006, but vetoed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who said that school curriculum should be left up to local schools. But there is a new governor now. And both supporters and opponents of the bill expect it will sail through the heavily Democratic Assembly and be signed into law by Gov. Jerry Brown, a Democrat who has been supportive of gay rights.

How much easier it is for a politician to sign a bill than for students to slog through political lessons year after year instead of learning what truly belongs in a history class. It's disgusting to compel young people to go to school and then to treat them like this.

And don't tell me that the gay rights movement genuinely belongs in a history course. Let that topic be integrated into history courses to the extent that they truly belong in a history course, not because some politicos wanted to score points or because their emotive constituents feel that there's an epidemic of bullying and suicide and it can be cured by making heroes out of Harvey Milk and his ilk.

“It is very basic to me that people dislike and fear that with which we are less familiar,” said Mark Leno, who sponsored the bill and is one of the first openly gay men elected to the State Senate. Students who come to view their fellow classmates as regular members of society, rather than misfits, will find that “their behavior changes for the better,” Mr. Leno said.

Leno just intuits cause and effect. "It's very basic to me" isn't a good enough foundation for a law that appropriates and exploits millions of hours of the time of other human beings. I could just assert that it's very basic to me that when young people are compelled to spend day after day, year after year, under the control of adults cranking out what sounds like state indoctrination, that they will rebel against authority. And then where's the good behavior you had your warm heart set on?

ADDED: Shouting Thomas cites "South Park":

The parents in that series are all veterans of the 60s, and they think that rebellion ended with them. They think that all of the issues of authority versus kids were solved when they were adolescents. So, they are constantly astonished to discover that their kids think they are pompous windbags preaching bullshit. Their kids are rebelling against them.

Click through to see what Shouting Thomas thinks about bullying.