It Can Happen Here … and is.

I wonder if the Republicans in WI meet in private on the weekends to practice their goose-stepping.

It Can Happen Here has already happened here and is getting worse. See Bush v. Gore.

Fixed that for you ;)

Did the e-mail request mention they were eliminating 70% of public University funding and replacing it with an internet college?

The war against labour being conducted by USACorp is deadly serious and will not be easily stopped. In my state, NH, the paid for legislature is soon to pass another draconian bill designed to remove collective bargaining.

Wis. NH and many other states that are determined to return all labour back to the the dark ages are in the hands of radical right wing puppets most bought and paid for by USACorp, the Koch brothers and their ilk. They are also striking at a woman’s right to control over her own reproductive organs. These are very dangerous people.

Perhaps it is a stretch, but it seems to me that protecting State workers could certainly be a part of one’s duty in any historical perspective. Maybe they can get the emails; not necessarily any problem with state property…imvho. Not like it’s porn to fair minded folks.

Wisnconsin Republicans have really followed their leader into unknown realms of wingnuttery.

Going to be a bumpy ride…saw news about some fine for Perry b/c of his not disclosing rental income…(I think) What a fraud.

AND THE KILLIN’ GOEZ ON AND ON AND…

Citizen David Dayen:

The Republican Party in the state of Wisconsin has been packin’ school boards and public institutions in this state for a long time. The state university system is completely corrupted and many county boards in urban and predominantly “blue” areas like Milwaukee have been packed for years…that’s where Governor Shitforbrains came from. Under Tommy Thompson the state bureaucracy was compromised so badly that it will take 20 years of Democratic governors to clean it up.

As for this particular situation, the effort to silence critics by monitoring political communications and indeed all communications has gone on with the active support of politicians like Barak Obama since at least the late 1990′s. And this is why the designation of public employees as vassals of the state is so important in the ongoing battle for control of local politics from the central government.

Our local school board is in a very “red” county and state senate district and it has announced through it’s superindendent that it will proceed apace to dismantle the existing union contract and procedures and has issued pink slips to all teachers with the stated goal of rehiring with total disregard for existing seniority and negotiated layoff procedures. This makes the efforts of the teachers to oppose the governor’s union busting efforts and recall the state senator very dangerous given the willingness of the state executive to use it’s power to give the local board “the tools” to supress local workers.

This is a nationwide putsch and you wonder why I have been callin these people “fascists” for the last 20 years.

KEEP THE FAITH AND PASS THE AMMUNITION, WE ARE ALL EGYPTIANS NOW!!

I went over to read Cronon’s blog postings.

He says that ALEC ~ the organization behind this madness with the Kochs ~ has an exclusive membership. You have to be a Republican elected official (purity test anyone) and spend/pledge $100/year, if they let you join.

Wow.

So this organization with selective membership practices endorsing its Republick bona fides is on a witch hunt through Cronon’s e-mails to discover proof that he is acting from his interests as a lefty partisan? And they want to tank him with this information? Riiiiiight.

Ironic.

Sounds like WikiLeaks in reverse.

Amazingly, on Feb. 18, Judy Woodruff of the PBS NewsHour hosted an ALEC spokesman
for a discussion of the situation in Wisconsin without bothering to tell her viewers
that ALEC had written the Wisconsin bill.

This kind of activity has been very effective for the GOP. They used this strategy to discredit the IPCC and create doubt about what is solid scientific fact. Since they don’t have good arguments on their side, they use personal attacks to discredit their critics. Same old, same old from the know-nothing party.

William Cronin lifted up the rock and all those ALEC creatures are scurrying for cover and the way to do that is to file this FOIA on Cronin to scare him into backing down.
His article is spot on and they cannot stand the sunlight.
Imho, William Cronin is not going to back down and this might just get more interesting very soon.

They want to see hoe deeply U of W is involved in the organizing. That way they can figure how much penalizing to do.

Frankly, the U of W folks should start randomly putting stuff in emails just to screw with them and do a meet up to discuss ways of working around big brother wisconsin version. The GOP can make things harder but that should have been a given.

Personally, email is not the way I’d do business if I was concerned about privacy.

The whole Republican philosophy can be summed up simply: Money = Might + Might = Right.

Pogo’s “We have seen the enemy….Very troubling stuff.

I call it the “Republican” philosophy but that isn’t really right. I should call it the ruling caste philosophy.

Agreed. 100%.

I get a really solid feeling about him: lots of integrity and lots of energy. He’s been thinking about his own transparency and authenticity for years, even to the point of keeping his private communications separate from his academic work.

Very interesting development, yes.

And he’s humble while reporting the massive number of hits his objective blog writing recieved right off the bat while being willing to thoroughly back himself up in the face of this attack.

Lookin’ good for our side!

I think this anti labor thing may (hopefully will) backfire. I suspect it will awaken all workers to the assault on “work”… honest work by capital as expressed by the republicans.

If workers really unite and strike… big time… they’ll get the message… it’s the working people than make america go, not these bloviating aholes.

“keeping his private communications separate from his academic work…”
This is excellent and as cwaltz said at #15, “e-mail is not the way to go if you want to communicate in private” and I am paraphrasing you cwaltz so please forgive the translation.
I have always felt that sending e-mail is like sending a postcard through the mail, anyone can read it and as we have seen lately, it can come back to bite you really bad. (Thinking Indiana legal office)

THERE ARE ONLY RADICAL AND “MORE” RADICAL REPUBLICON ARTISTS

The purpose of the existence of the MORE radical teabaggers, the Rush Limbaughs, Glenn Becks, Sean Hannity’s, Michelle Bachmanns, Steve Kings, Jim DeMints and Scott Walkers is to make the radical Republicon artists/neocons; the Bill O’Reillys, Mitt Romneys, Joe Scarborough’s, Tom Coburns, Mike Huckabees, Haley Barbours and Lindsey Grahams APPEAR to be REASONABLE by COMPARISON, when they are in FACT Republicon artist CONSERVATIVE EXTREMISTS to their very cores. As a result, “compromising” with Republicon artists pushes malleable/non-confrontational Democrats like Obama FURTHER and FURTHER to the RIGHT…so much so that liberals and progressives stayed home during the 2010 midterm elections because Obama ALLOWED himself to be PUSHED to the RIGHT in the name of BI-PARTISANSHIP…otherwise known as appeasement/empowerment/surrender to RADICALISM!

Abandoning and or compromising away liberal/progressive/Democratic values is not progress; it’s getting in bed with and validating/accepting the PROGRESSION OF EVIL.

Every seemingly “small” compromise with today’s Republicon artists is an insidious movement from the light to the dark side of humanity/morality….and Obama isn’t REJECTING it; he’s FACILITATING it by “NOT” FIERCELY and REPEATEDLY CONDEMNING it.

No matter what his intentions, Obama is aiding and abetting EVIL by allowing it to gain MOMENTUM and ACCEPTANCE…and HE is PRAGMATICALLY contributing to the REGRESSION of Democratic values/morals…and he is CAUSING Democrats to lose voter support because they see a Democratic leader who is leading them TOWARD the EVIL of today’s RADICAL REPUBLICANISM!

Blue Texan’s regularly scheduled post is up: Peggy Noonan Officially Goes All Wobbly On Us

“This is allowable under Wisconsin’s Open Records law.” Actually, it’s probably not.

http://www.wicourts.gov/sc/opinion/DisplayDocument.html?content=html&seqNo=52285

Good times. *clapping* :-)

This could end up opening a can of worms for the Republicans if news organizations ask to see the emails of folks on their side to see who was blogging from work. Do they really want that?

Citizen osage:

Yep…but the best way to counter minority takeover from the top in a democracy is to hit back from the bottom…I think that when the dust settles on this putsch the corporatists are gunna rue the day they woke up their slumberin’ slaves.

This is nothing more than the systematic elimination of the middle class and the creation of a new class, the working poor. Oh and there’s another name for it…serfs.

Dave, thank you so very much for this. Cronin’s blog is excellent and I am emailing a link to everyone I know and posting it on my Facebook page.
Now, a word to ALEC – you are messing with the people of the United States and you have sorely underestimated them. You have NO idea who you are messing with.

Citizen theloneapple:

Yep this particular effort to silence public information from public workers is gunna backfire big time since by definition there are more of us than there are of them…in any case in order to get some dirt they’re gunna hafta uncover a lot a stuff that they will wish they hadn’t and because of the internet and e-mail it will hit the corporate news megaphones whether they want it to or not.

Presumably, Walker has hired Leura Canary to represent his interests in this matter.

I assume the request is an attempt to show the good professor used state assets in an inappropriate manner in researching, writing and publishing his Times OpEd, or similar materials. Better yet, since actual facts can be so uncooperative, it might only want to claim the professor’s conduct was inappropriate.

I should think a strong case could be made that as the professor is not a janitor, administrator or even a biology professor, but a labor historian and public intellectual, his public advocacy of labor history and criticism of its debasement by current politicians or others would be part of his job. Secondarily, it might be a permitted incidental personal use.

Clearly, the goal here – and it’s not just Walkers, but one shared by a dozen other governors, their think tank supporters and the billionaire patrons to both – is to silence critics, to search out their networks and to silence them, too. Stalin was very good at that game. Periodically, he encouraged public dissent, took names, and sent them to the Gulag. The Gulag here could be the unemployment line, loss of or inability to get tenure.

We may need to help the good professor with a legal defense fund. Let’s start with publicity, even though the right has long been immunized against criticism of its hypocrisy, its goals and its methods. It deeply desires an ignorant a vulnerable, passive, economically, physically and emotionally weak public. Just like the wolf in the Little Red Riding Hood.

In the beginning Internet colleges were innovative but the whole strategy is just a Trojan Horse to destroy the University system and replace it with a brainwashing-for-profit factory.

“Jerkin’ Back ‘n’ Forth” by Devo

Booyah!

For-profit schools are overwhemlingly student loan factories. Graduation and placement rates are horrendous; the debts they produce are formidable.

What are the odds a similar request made of Walker’s use of state resources would produce untold volumes of their personal use, some of which would be antithetical to his duties as governor and to the welfare of the good people of Wisconsin?

At the rate Wisconsin is going, it’s going to turn itself into the Mississippi of the northern Midwest.

This is how Republicans roll. Their primary objective is always destroying their political opposition. Actually doing the jobs they were elected to do is purely incidental.

O c’mon now. Kaplan’s default rate is only 3 times higher than those of public universities and private non-profit schools.

I believe they also spend about roughly 5X cost getting them there though promising “too good to be true scenarios to marginal college students” (MARKETING) as opposed to paying their instructors.

Dam I love those ads.

I can certainly identify with Prof. Cronon’s experience. I got fired from my job as an editor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB)after writing on my blog, Legal Schnauzer, about the Bush-era political prosecution of former Democratic Gov. Don Siegelman. And I don’t have to guess about why I was fired. I have an audiotaped conversation with a UAB HR rep, admitting that I was targeted because of my reporting on the Siegelman case. Instead of going after my e-mails, as they are doing with Prof. Cronon, they claimed I was writing my blog at work, misusing state time and resources. Their own IT expert, who was assigned to follow my every keystroke for several months, stated I never wrote the first word of my blog at work. I still got fired.

Is there something a little more sinister a foot? Perhaps the Walker folks are attempting some back door approach to expose Cronin’s sources? Get rid of the sources and Cronin won’t have anything to write about or Perhaps Walker and his cronies think that they may have someone on staff that may be sending Cronin information and this is an attempt to weed them out.

As with Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson, the more credible the critic, the more the rabbid right has an interest in destroying their credibility. This is from the James Fallows piece already cited:

William Cronon…is as good as the American academic establishment can now produce. He is president of the American Historical Association; he is the Frederick Jackson Turner professor of history at the University of Wisconsin; his Nature’s Metropolis and Changes in the Land are books any writer would be proud to claim.

Changes is the book that Josh Marshall cited in his post as a major influence in his own academic work, prior to starting his own website.

Cronon is a historian, one of America’s best. The right wants to destroy his credibility because his knowledgeable criticism undercuts their ability to sell their disaster capitalism. These are not people who follow rules or take prisoners; they imagine themselves as an army of General Maximuses out to unleash hell on everyone who stands in their way. Adjust your opposition to them accordingly.

Earl:

I think you have a brilliant idea. Someone in Wisconsin needs to move forward with this idea. Two can play this game.

I just finished reading all of Cronon’s posts, op-ed, discussion from Steve Benen and Josh Marshall. I hope this becomes front page news all over (but it’s the MSM, so probably not).

GO DR. CRONON!! BRAVO!

Yea, if I recall correctly, the budget breakdowns for for-profit colleges are about 5% each on instruction and placement, about 60% on sales and marketing, and about 30% profit.

1950′s crap again. I do believe the Joe McCarthy label will stick to Walker and Cronin won’t back down.

Cronin has effectively torn the mask off the ugly face of post 1964 Conservatism.

I admire Don Sigegelman and your efforts on his behalf. The stink of Rove lingers everywhere.

Thank you for your courage.

Yes, email is very much like a postcard. But when faculty use it to communicate with their students or with colleagues inside or outside their institution, they shouldn’t have to assume the messages will be read by anyone. And mostly they would not be.

I expect similar action will be taken against Pharyngula and its author. PZ Myers is so shrill when it comes to debunking creationism and intelligent [sic] design, beloved of the right as a tool to gain political power. I’ll bet Walker imagines himself a Christian, too.

Most institutions allow “reasonable personal use” of such resources. And BTW, one would think that correspondence involving students and the like would be protected as confidential. It would be a rare, and poor, academic advisor who never learned about deeply personal information from a student or gave them personal advice.

I thought of your and your colleagues’ experiences in Alabama in my post @31.

The Fascists aren’t coming…they’re already here.

Yes, they do, at least the University of Notre Dame does (I wrote their Responsible Use Policy). But I was responding to the “email is like a postcard” comment. People assume emails are private, but they are not (necessarily), plus they are easily spoofed.

EDIT: Interactions with students are governed by FERPA, the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act. I would think most email communications with students would be considered “educational records” under this act.

Agree. E-mails are as permanent as they are not private. In earlier work, I reviewed years after the fact more than one torrid office romance played out on e-mails, data and conduct that might not have enhanced anyone’s experience with their employer.

Although my academic institution allows “reasonable personal use” of email, it does not allow use for political purposes. In order to prevent snooping under FOIA, maintain a separate email account just for political comment that is not connected with the institution in any way. Then you only have to worry about the FBI.

Many institutions (my experience is in higher ed) are waking up to the fact that email retention is a big issue, because of legal discovery) and are opting to severely limit retention of emails on backup servers. However, many people download their emails to their office computers (or their home machines) and retention is much more problematic in that case.

We have prohibitions concerning political activity, and also a strict prohibition against using University resources for commercial purposes. When I realized (after the fact) that using my university email on eBay was a violation, I immediately got a Gmail account and strictly separated my personal from my work emails. Never mind that my profits from eBay were miniscule and I didn’t buy or sell often, it still is commercial use.

Cronon’s Times OpEd, which Fallows claims was published days after the WI GOP made this open records law request, makes abundantly clear why Walker would consider him a sworn enemy.

The turmoil in Wisconsin is not only about bargaining rights or the pension payments of public employees. It is about transparency and openness. It is about neighborliness, decency and mutual respect. Joe McCarthy forgot these lessons of good government, and so, I fear, has Mr. Walker. Wisconsin’s citizens have not.

Read the whole thing. Cronon is restrained, specific, objective. He illustrates Wisconsin’s history as a nursery for the labor movement and for responsible, progressive government. He gently points out how different Walker’s behavior is, but how much it resembles the demeanor, if not the goals, of Tail Gunner Joe McCarthy.

Walker wants to demolish that history; progressivism for him is an existential threat. Why, because its focus is the common good? If anything, Walker is more ambitious than McCarthy and just as mean and sociopathic. McCarth’s excuse was that he was a drunk. What’s Walker’s?

The political content of Cronon’s OpEd was marginal. It is an objective comparison of Wisconsin’s history with Walker’s conduct.

As I said up-post, I would argue that his advocacy of such distinctions is part of his job as a public intellectual and one of America’s leading historians. Besides, I think we have yet to learn whether Cronon used public resources for his OpEd, let alone for the blog post preceding it, which is what spooked the WI GOP into seeking his personal e-mails.

Yes, according to what I read, the open records request followed the first blog post, which is long but excellent reading. So are the op-ed and his response. And he has made it abundantly clear that he is a centrist and cautions repeatedly about being aware of bias in the sources he links to. I hope he writes more, because I learned a lot today.

Let’s find out what resources Cronon actually used.

Bottom line, though, is that the means through which Cronon communicated his views to the public is a shiny object. The elephant in the living room is still Walker and his patrons, and the actions he has taken and will take to make disaster capitalism the norm intended for the private enrichment of his patrons.

Besides, I think we have yet to learn whether Cronon used public resources for his OpEd, let alone for the blog post preceding it, which is what spooked the WI GOP into seeking his personal e-mails.

I think Cronon makes it pretty clear that they weren’t going after him for use of public resources. The goal is to intimidate him and scare him off and threaten him with the same kind of treatment Roger Schuler received.

I don’t expect him to back down. And he was clear in his writings that he did not use public resources.

I read all the links as well. Cronin has argued eloquently and effectively backed up by superb examples.

I wish Obummer had a bit of his spine.

Thanks for filling in that important piece of information. I assumed he had not used public resources for his blog, which would mean he probably did not for his OpEd, both of which should be considered private actions unrelated to his work as a public employee.

The latter informs his private views, but does not conflict with them. An analogy would be to an English lit. professor writing a Pulitzer-winning play. The extra-curricular work benefits the paid public work, but does not infringe on any duty owed the employer.

I hope Cronon is successful in fighting this misuse of the open records law. That use is a form of extortion that favors the right. It confers no benefit on the public; it damages it.

Welcome to the United Corporations of America.

Have him post all of his email on his blog.

The file an FOIA request back on the Rs to determine who asked for the records.

Exactly right. And they also make corporatist Dems look reasonable by comparison, which is just as bad, or probably worse.

Cronon’s credibility was completely destroyed when he labeled himself ‘as a centrist and a lifelong independent’. Wavering between an ultra liberal and a liberal doesn’t qualify one for that label :-)