Saturday at the protest.

On State Street, in Madison, today:







(All today's pics: here.)

Sidney Lumet, RIP.

He directed many movies, but 2 are iconic, with some of the most memorable, emotional scenes ever.

1. "Dog Day Afternoon."



Attica! Attica!

2. "Network."



I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore.

***

Here's the NYT obit. Lumet was 86 and died of lymphoma.

At the Protest Dog Café...

... unmuzzle and yelp.

It is time for you to stop all of your sobbing.

I hear Meade playing the Garnet Mimms version of "Cry Baby," and after a conversation that I will discuss below, I ask him why he was playing that. He pointed to this comment by Kirby Olson in the "Nate Silver does the math" post:

I wonder if anybody else remembers the Garnett Mimms hit, Cry Cry Baby, that briefly lit the charts in about what 1964? Janis Joplin later covered it, but Garnett Mimms had such a wonderful range in his voice. Mimms is still alive, but I bet he can't still sing like he did then. What an athletic, operatic voice for lovely rock. We should turn it on for all our Democratic friends who have come home crying that they lost again.

People do need to grieve when they've lost, but an invitation to cry coming from the winners is more of a taunt. And I've spent so many nights, reading comments on this blog, and so many times, lefties have countered the complaints of righties by saying things like "whine and bitch, whine and bitch," "call the wahmbulance," and "waaaaaaahh." It's meant to rub it in, and it's not Mimmsy at all.

But what I said to Meade was I remember when that song — and I mean the Garnet Mimms version — was on the radio. It was 1963. I was 12. I listened to top 40 AM radio, and I liked the songs that felt like they were about teenagers. There was a brightness and a happiness to the songs that dominated the top 40. Even the songs about crying. The biggest song about crying in 1963 was "It's My Party." Lesley Gore is gloriously triumphant in her claim of the right to cry.

"Cry Baby" seemed to come from a dreary 1950s world of old people and their problems. Meade says he loved music like that. Maybe that look into the weighty, complicated lives of adults was enticing to some really young radio listeners, but I wanted it on a different station. Here, I said, here's my answer to that "Cry Baby":



I love the original Kinks version too, and you'd better believe I had all the early Kinks albums, Kinks, Kinda Kinks, and Kinks Kontroversy. I still love that kind of [kinda] thing. It still appeals to me more than the anguished bellyaching of soul music.

***

Bonus: "Best Songs About Crying."

"Don’t run away from the issue, Planned Parenthood. Own it!"

Says Glenn Reynolds, modeling his "I had an abortion" T-shirt. Would that work? I think the pro-choice side is well-advised to take care of the feelings of those who believe abortion is murder. What is accomplished, on this issue, by forcing people to confront something they find so horrible and are never going to accept?

Here's the ad he's talking about.  One thing that seems odd to me is that if you emphasize the importance of government funding for "women's health" more generally — with talk about cancer screenings and STDs — then how do you explain the gender bias? Why should we be all fired up about women's health and not men's health? Is there a special role of government in taking care of women? Why? The sex discrimination is only legitimate if it's based on the real physical difference: the capacity of women to grow new human beings inside their bodies.

Ironically, if you support abortion rights, it is probably because you think a woman's body is her own sovereign domain, and government should stay out of it. But government wants in. Society wants in. One way or another.

John Fund on the Wisconsin Supreme Court election: "an independent investigation is called for..."

In the Wall Street Journal:

An independent investigation is called for, if for no other reason than to clear the air and to recommend procedures to ensure such errors don't happen again. Just as many Wisconsin officials have ignored or downplayed evidence of vote fraud (see the Milwaukee Police Department's 2008 detailed investigation) so too have sloppy election procedures been allowed to fester in some counties.

If the mistake was innocent, it resulted from a lack of transparency.... [T]his should be a wake-up call for the state's election officials. It's time that Wisconsin update its election laws for the 21st century. Ideas from both major parties -- ranging from Democratic suggestions that county clerks not be elected as partisan officials to GOP objections to the practice of allowing voters to register and vote at the same time on Election Day -- should be on the table.

Translation: Republicans should embrace and leverage the Democrats' fears.

Shutdown averted.

"... more spending cuts for Republicans while giving Democrats a key win on an issue related to abortion rights..."

We heard about the 4:30 rally at the top of State Street and got there in time to hear a couple speakers try to rile up the crowd...

... Should Wisconsin have to "worry about being an international human rights violation, having conditions where the U.N. should intervene"? The crowd looks forlorn, and the speaker calls for a march around the square.

Meade and I go clockwise as the march goes counter-clockwise so we catch the front as it streams by chanting "We're not going away." A woman near young children wears a sweatshirt that says, in large block letters "Fuck Walker." There are lots of "Integrity" signs, including in the hands of some young guys who stop to interrogate Meade.

The guy in the fedora says "I'm just a citizen admiring another citizen's ability to be out in public." A man walking by points to Meade and calls him "a right-wing agitator." I question the fedora guy about his "costume."

We catch up to a small demonstration that appears to be the unionized crew from "Legally Blonde" (the show playing at the Overture Center nearby). They've got a new chant: "The people, ripped off/Are gonna get pissed off." Sweeping in from the side are marchers chanting: "Hey hey ho ho/These right-wing tricks have got to go."

There's a shot of me photographing the Segway-riding protester, and then a dog comes along. Meade gets down to pet him, and the owner tells us he's a Basset-Beagle mix, his name is Joey, and "This is what dogmocracy looks like." There's a bit more, and then it's time to go.

(Video by Meade, edited by me.)

Today's low-key protest, with lots of preprinted signs that said "Integrity" and "No Games."

We saw a couple speakers attempting to infame the small crowd with suspicions about the Supreme Court election, but the people seemed resigned and grim....





The subsequent march around the square stimulated conversation and a natural smile...



Some young guys with integrity signs accost Meade and interrogate him about his "angle"...



"It's not over until we say it's over," says a sign, quoting the movie "Animal House"....



Here are all 58 of today's photographs. I've also got a 5-minute video, coming soon.

"In 1981, 27-year-old Joseph Paul Jernigan shot and stabbed the man who discovered him stealing a microwave oven."

"Jernigan was sentenced to death, and a prison chaplain convinced him to donate his body to science. Thirty years on, 1871 slices of his body are animated on a laptop screen and photographed on a long exposure in various dark locations, reconstructing Jernigan as the subject of a haunting new project."

"Schumer likens conservatives to a flea."

I'm sorry. Am I not paying enough attention to the budget crisis? Do I need to show that I care? Well... so... here: "Schumer likens conservatives to a flea."

An inconvenient knee.

You know the pic does look pretty fake. But that knee!

Tea Drawings.

"Tea bag + index card + ink."

US News Weighs Request to Add the Most Freakishly Manipulable Measure to Law School Rankings.

Weigh well, o wise ones, ye who determine the hierarchy of legal academia. 

ADDED: Under the equal protection case law, we'll need to say our race discrimination is narrowly tailored to serve a compelling state interest. Surely, maintaining our U.S. News rank is compelling, right?

Climbing Hyperion, the world's tallest tree.

379 feet 4 inches. Amazing... that it's that tall.... and that a man can climb it....



ADDED: In other tree-climbing news:

A tree-climbing bandit attempting to break into a Brooklyn home Thursday died after a branch snapped and sent him plummeting to the ground... 

Nate Silver does the math.

"There is no evidence that Waukesha County’s revised vote count is unusually high, whereas there is some evidence that its original vote count was unusually low."

Massive detail at the NYT link.