The news was full of talk about the Wisconsin issue. Governor Walker had put together some atrocious piece of legislation and was busy railroading it through the state legislature. The only way for the minority Democrats to stop him was to deny him quorum by skipping town. There were reports on the radio here, the gist of which was "there are no Democrats in Wisconsin." Supposedly the police were ordered to bring in any they could find. They couldn't find any. No Democrats in Wisconsin.

Then the liberal blogs decided they had to do something. MoveOn.org declared Saturday "March on the State Capitol Day". I found somebody who was going up for the event named Blanche and hitched a ride up there with her. I took the above picture somewhere in Solano County on I-80.

     

We got there about the time the last speaker was leaving the stage. A woman came on and said "that's it." She asked us to sign the sheets and pick up any trash we saw on our way out. I decided to get as many pictures of signs as I could before everybody was gone.

     

     

Most of the crowd was union wage earners.

     

        

        

        

        

     

About this time somebody told me that most of the speeches were things like "I'm the Shop Steward (or other big cheese) for [Union Name Here] and all [big number of members] stand with our brothers and sisters in Wisconsin."

     

  

  

Across the street was this collection of TEA party activists. They were yelling nasty things at the Union types, who were giving it back in full measure.  There were quite a few cops around, enough to be a presence and call for backup if things got weird. Seems like the yelling was good entertainment for the yellers. Kept them busy for sure.

I wish I'd told those TEA party activists about the time the CEO, the union guy and the TEA party activist were having tea and cookies. There were a dozen cookies. The CEO took eleven of them and told the TEA party activist "watch out for that union guy. He wants a piece of your cookie." Unfortunately I didn't hear that story until later.

        

  

     

About this time the people with the bullhorns started repeating endlessly that it was time to go. The pace at which people left quickened. We started heading for the car to.

     

I didn't realize that Wisconsin has a whole "FORWARD" thing going on until I went there for the Green Party nominating convention in 2004. Then when the quarter came out it simply made sense. Since then I've liked using the phrase "we're moving forward together" as a code phrase for "there is consensus about the right thing to do on that."

  

We'd parked at the K Street Mall. On the way back to the car I saw this statue. I remembered it from my Sacramento days. Now it looks like the message in the stuff the guy is balancing on his head boils down to "time to put your heart into being a cheese head at home." I seem to have Wisconsin on the brain right now.