At the Red Bud Café...

... show some color.

A word with the lone protester.

On Thursday, in Madison, the Tea Party had broken up, and we were walking away when we saw one man, in another part of the Capitol Square, standing alone, holding up a sign. I would have walked on by, but Meade, wielding a small camera, approached him.



No one else was anywhere near him, but he staunchly held up his sign, which read: "911 Underground Demolition!" The "11" part of "911" was shaped like the World Trade Center Towers.



Meade said "hi" and read the sign out loud as he walked up. "So you believe it was..."

"I'm the only one," the man said. "911 Truth doesn't even know this stuff."

He handed Meade a paper that explained that the WTC was built with explosive nuclear devices underground. The man said he was thrown out of the Tea Party: "They literally told me to go away. They don't want me here."

I asked, "Were you trying to start a counter-demonstration over on this side?"

He said, "No, not at all. They just didn't want me over there. There were all these spies, like, pointing at me."

I said, "Who are the 'they'? Who didn't want you over there?"

He paused, giggled, then laughed and said, "The Illuminati."

A Tea Party composition, reframed and recolorized...

... with an emphasis on the color red.



(Here's the wider view in black and white.)

Amazing popcorn...

... + popcorn dog.



On the opening day of the Farmers Market, here in Madison, Wisconsin.

Happy/sad.

Scott Brown is "sad" that Barack Obama was "amused."

Jason Levin, that "Crash the Tea Party" guy, is a middle school teacher — and he's been put on suspension.

Harsh?

Levin has said he would seek to embarrass Tea Partiers by attending their rallies dressed as Adolf Hitler, carrying signs bearing racist, sexist and anti-gay epithets and acting as offensively as possible -- anything short of throwing punches....

Now, the source said, parents have become outraged by the severity of his political activism, and many have told the school board members that it has no place in a public school system.

He didn't do it in the school system, did he?

What Goodwin Liu said about Samuel Alito...

At his confirmation hearing, lawprof Goodwin Liu, nominated for the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, is  being taken to task by Senator Kyl for what he said at Samuel Alito's confirmation hearing. (There is also talk of Liu as a future Supreme Court nominee.)

“Judge Alito’s record envisions an America where police may shoot and kill an unarmed boy to stop him from running away with a stolen purse … where a black man may be sentenced to death by an all-white jury for killing a white man,” Liu wrote. “I humbly submit that this is not the America we know. Nor is it the America we aspire to be.”

The testimony was “vicious, emotionally and racially charged, very intemperate, and to me it calls into question your ability to approach and characterize people’s positions in a fair and judicious way,” Kyl said.

Liu only acknowledged that this language was “unnecessarily flowery.”

Flowery? As Lou Reed once sang, "Vicious, you hit me with a flower...."

Bill Clinton in a fevered rave — or a calculated manipulation of public opinion — about the Tea Party and the Oklahoma City bombing.

The Oklahoma City bombing took place in 1995, during Bill Clinton's watch, so maybe little things set him off and the memories come flooding back. Maybe we should be tolerant of the old man's maunderings. But I think that Clinton is super-sharp, that he knows he can connect with the American psyche — not all the time, but some of the time, and that he's deliberately applying his skills for specific, political effect:

"Before the bombing occurred, there was a sort of fever" in the political dialogue that was in ways similar in content to the anger currently boiling up on talk radio and on the Internet, Clinton said at a forum on the 15th anniversary of the attack by Timothy McVeigh that killed 168.

"The fabric of American life had been unraveling" in 1995 amid high unemployment, Clinton said.

"The structure of the Cold War -- the clear bipolar world -- was coming to an end," Clinton said. "There were more and more people having trouble figuring out where they fit in. It is true that we see some of that today."

Clinton said people have the right "to advocate whatever the livin' Sam Hill they want to advocate" but they must observe "the basic line dividing criticism from violence or its advocacy."

"It's an odd thing to get attacked by the White House for a blog post..."

"... and odder still when the attack is for something mentioned in passing, and intended to highlight a political positive about a potential Supreme Court nominee."

More commentary here.

"Apparently lost upon the mostly college-aged protesters: for their false flag operation to work..."

"... they must blend in to the group, and then display signs that cast the tea party group at large as bigoted or racist."

Why is Pajamas Media assuming the people in the photographs are attempting to pass as protesters? They are making their counter-protest transparent and charmingly funny. Calling them stupid is... stupid.

"There's nothing between these ears."

Another detail from yesterday's Tea Party photographs:

"Down our throats in March/Up their [ass] in November."

I'm looking at the details of yesterday's Tea Party photos and cropping. It's interesting what you notice an instant before you'd have hit delete:

At the Tulip Café...

... you can loll about breezily.

Was this photo taken automatically by a school-supplied laptop without the knowledge of the sleeping teenager?

The caption:

"This photo, allegedly taken surreptitiously by the Lower Merion School District through a laptop web camera, shows Blake Robbins sleeping at home at 5 p.m. on Oct 26. (Photo provided by the Robbins family)"

There is a lawsuit based on what may very well have been a terrible invasion of privacy, but I've got to marvel at how the laptop caught such a well-framed and well-lit shot of the glossy-haired boy.

According to the latest filing by the Robbinses, officials first activated the tracking software on a school-issued Apple MacBook that Robbins took home on Oct. 20.

Hundreds of times in the next two weeks, the filing says, the program did its job each time it was turned on: A tiny camera atop the laptop snapped a photo, software inside copied the laptop screen image, and a locating device recorded the Internet address - something that could help district technicians pinpoint where the machine was.

The system was designed to take a new picture every 15 minutes until it was turned off....

Robbins and his parents say they first learned of the technology on Nov. 11, when an assistant Harriton principal confronted the teen with an image collected by the tracking software.

Robbins has said one image showed him with a handful of Mike and Ike candies - which the administrator thought were illegal pills.

Those overreaching school officials... exposed by their own over-aggressive control-freakishness... and the devious mind-tricks of Mike and Ike!

"I’m standing in front of you as a convicted felon, a lying imam, which is a physical, emotional and spiritual burden far greater than any sentence you could impose."

"Honest to God... it was never my intention to help those idiots for what they do in the name of Islam.... I cannot express my feelings in words, but I’m going to try... Violated. Betrayed. Used to the highest degree. Treated worse than a dog."

"I was appalled at the sexualization of Christ."

"I was horrified. I believe in freedom of expression. I believe in artistic freedom. I believe that a church is a holy place, and I certainly don’t want people telling anyone how to worship, but I was shocked, stunned, and if I hadn’t been prepared already, I think I would have just been ill.... I’m already very sensitive because of the pedophilia issue.... This doesn’t make it any better...."

See the problem?