On Wisconsin!

I don't know about you, but I am finding I have to at times put some serious filters on incoming information on events in the world these days.  I daren't glorify this information with the term "news," since so much of it is basically the elite media floating whatever crap they have been fed and have done no actual journalistic research on.  Is it sensational?  Will the gullible stay tuned?  Do our advertisers seem to still be paying the bills?

On the other hand, I barely know a twitter from a tweater, and facebook has been chiding me recently for how infrequently I check in, never mind actually actively do any proper social networking.  So I am less than tuned-in on that front, at times blurbed as an alternative to the increasingly monopolistic, corporatized, conservative-minded, and inept conventional media.

But I do what I hope you do - I go looking for information.  I pretty routinely scan our few remaining actual paper-based media.  And I more-or-less daily visit a handful of websites that I trust to keep me at least a micron shy of ignorant.  Which is to sadly say, probably far more in tune with the real world than the median in our ignorant land.

Union-busting in Wisconsin was a big deal not that long ago.  I was thrilled that the outrageous moves of the governor there met with a good deal of resistance from labor unions and plain folks from all over the country.  That outbreak was possibly the best news I can recall since the election of 2008.  I have not had a chance to properly delve into the details, but I have the sense there has been a judicial stay issued on the legislation the governor's thugs pushed through, probably violating state law, and then in the last day or so word that these same reprobates are defying the court.  Quite fascinating.

In the meantime, I will probably be in the coals to Newcastle department here, but I found the side-issue of Op-ed in NYT and posts by UW-Madison history prof quite gripping.  It didn't hurt that his name is just a vowel away from former Whitman College head who is also a historian.

Perhaps many of you have tumbled to this already, since rumor is it "went viral" via the social networks I am so not in tune with.

I found Professor Cronon immediately likeable, on the basis of his blog and op-ed writing (finally, someone more wordy than me!).  He is not progressive enough for me to latch onto politically.  But he is obviously knowledgeable, conscientious, fact-based, and concerned about the destruction of our country's basic principles that is at the heart of the recent republican thuggery.

In essence, Cronon has both called out the WI gov for his anti-worker vendetta and identified a clandestine organization ("ALEC") that apparently has been crafting hyper-conservative proposed laws to be coughed out like fur-balls by noxious elephantine state legislators as if they had the brains to think of them on their own.

Possibly ALEC is a never-mind.  It might have been so had it not been for an egregious demand by the republican party in WI for a total violation of academic freedom, in the form of demand for the release of Cronon's emails.  This is a good story with legs, but you will be doing some serious reading.

I originally became aware of this story via Talking Points Memo, one of those visit-every-time-you-can sites I alluded to earlier.  Josh Marshall, the site major-domo, had some personal connections to offer as a history major himself:

This is a bizarre, ugly turn of events. And for me it's a little weird because of the people involved. I just found out about it from TPM Reader AS.

Bill Cronon -- or William Cronon, as I think of him -- is a Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin. A few days ago he wrote an oped in the Times critical of Gov. Walker and his push to abolish collective bargaining rights for public employees in Wisconsin. About a week before that, he wrote a blog post -- the first in a new blog called Scholar as Citizen -- examining just who's behind this big anti-union push. He focused on a group called ALEC (The American Legislative Exchange Council).

Now, so far, nothing particularly controversial about any of this. But then it took a dark turn. Or perhaps better to say, then the story got into gear with everything else we've seen out of the Walker administration over the last three months.

Less than two days after Cronon published the blog post, the Wisconsin Republican Party filed a state open records request to gain access to Cronon's personal emails to get a look at what communications or discussions or sources or anything else went into writing it.

 I encourage you to explore those links - to the blog and NYT op-ed.  They speak to some very important issues in our politicals these days.  This is a brave, informed person, doing determined research, who deserves our support.  There is no way he appears to be as partisan or ideological as, say, I am.  What he is, is a smart, lucid, research-savvy threat to the theocratist/corporationists, determined to defend the corporations and plutocrats who fund their campaigns to be elected to their outrageously overpaid and health-care-compensated sinecures.

Unsurprisingly, the repubs of WI are having a very serious case of the whinies.  The poor things.  Here's Cronon's response.