It's been an intense week so far on the Capitol Square in Madison. We're in the final weeks of the budget season, as Gov. Walker's ALEC-sourced, slash-and-burn budgetary assault on the poor and working-class moves inexorably forward. (The Assembly is expected to take up the budget bill on Tuesday.)
Meanwhile, what's uppermost in Wisconsin coverage with the right-wing noise machine?
Zombies and the Special Olympics.
For months, protesters have been dogging Gov. Scott Walker's every move, protesting his every appearance. For this entire past week, there's been an encampment set up along two sides of the Capitol Square, an around-the-clock presence with a topically-themed presence for every day of the week around which to organize marches and awareness-raising events.
On Wednesday, according to the Wisconsin State Journal (Madison's conservative-leaning daily), the protesters held:
“Die-In and Zombie March” by about 50 people protesting cuts to student aid and a new voter ID law that critics say will make it harder for students to vote, said Erika Wolf, field organizer and lobbyist for the United Council of UW Students, an advocacy group that represents about 150,000 students throughout Wisconsin.
Participants wore zombie makeup and red-streaked T-shirts stating “Students are as good as dead” and lay on the steps of the Capitol while a “eulogy” was read and other protestors, dressed in black, posed as “mourners,” Wolf said.
Then they marched through the Capitol to the other side of the Square -- and that's where the encountered the set-up.
Governor Walker was appearing to honor a group of Special Olympics athletes on the occasion of Wisconsin's 25th Annual Law Enforcement Torch Run.
Again, keep in mind that Walker hasn't appeared in the open air in Madison since before he "dropped the bomb" with the first of the budget bills in February.
According to Dane 101, what happened next went like this:
There was a tense moment when a group of more than 20 students arrived in zombie make-up, fresh from a "die-in" protest on the State Street side of the Capitol. However, the protesters stood to the sides and in the back during the early speakers and it wasn't until Walker took the stage that they made their presence known.
As Walker stepped to the podium the zombie protesters went to the front of the audience and, along with other protesters in the crowd, turned their backs. Some raised their fists in a symbol of "solidarity." They stood silently and allowed Walker to speak and when he finished the zombie protesters walked away, shook the hands of Special Olympic athletes and wished them luck in the games.
Again from the WSJ:
Kelly Kloepping, vice-president of communications for Special Olympics Wisconsin, said the protesters were respectful and caused no disruption.
But waiting in the crowd was a reporter from the right-wing MacIver Institute, ready to pounce on whatever protester interaction might happen.
Their footage (linked here but I won't embed) and the subsequent flogging of the story all across the RW media has been shrieking about how the union thug protesters are the lowest of the low, how dare they pick on the poor defenseless Special Olympians?
These silent protesters, who simply filed forward and turned their backs on the Governor, were compared to Fred Phelps and the Westboro Baptist Church in the Wall Street Journal online yesterday.
Fred Phelps!!!
I could wish, along with Chris Rickert in a Wisconsin State Journal piece this morning ("Let the Special Olympians have a say") that someone had actually asked the athletes what they thought.
They might have even known that the Republicans have proposed big cuts to the Special Olympics on the federal level. (Mother Jones, GOP Cuts: A "Guillotine Job" on the Special Olympics).
The day after the Special Olympics event, I had a chance to chat with a local law-enforcement buddy of mine. I asked him whether he thought that the brou-ha-ha with the protesters was a setup, and -- speaking in an entirely non-official, purely personal opinion capacity -- he responded, "Oh, totally."
I have a child who will be eligible for Special Olympics next year. I am not outraged at the protesters' actions, though I'm chagrined that they fell into the trap. I am, however, increasingly furious at the right-wing noise machine's exploitation of this set-up incident and the athletes who got caught too, as MacIver and Fox et al. ramp up their faux pearl-clutching louder and louder.
UPDATE: The noise-machine outrage is also drowning out the pleas of families like mine regarding the freeze on community-based long-term care that's in this budget. Great article in the Capital Times this morning (Families protest caps on support programs for young adults with disabilities).