A Million Wisconsinites Petition to Recall Scott Walker: "Petitions with the names of 1 million Wisconsinites were submitted to state elections officials today, in a move that will jump-start the process of removing the nation’s most notorious antilabor governor from office... In all, close to 2 million signatures were submitted Tuesday, building the historic in-the-streets popular uprising that rocked Wisconsin in 2012 into a electoral uprising that has the potential to rock the politics not just of the state but of the nation in 2012. The movement to oust Walker will have secured the support of a higher percentage of eligible voters than has ever before sought to recall an American governor."
[more inside]
posted by flex
on Jan 17, 2012 -
106 comments
The Burton Holmes Archive has information about Burton Holmes, the travel writer who became the first person to make filmic travelogues. More importantly, they also have a lot of
film clips by Holmes and his associate,
André de la Varre, who was also a great travelogue maker himself. Watching these clips is not quite time travel, but it is as close as we can get. Take a look at
Reykjavík, Iceland, in 1926,
Lake Michigan in 20s,
Cairo in 1932 and
the 1955 Rio de Janeiro carnival. The later films have sound and narration, but I prefer the silent ones.
[Burton Holmes previously, André de la Varre previously, and the Travel Film Archive, which runs Burton Holmes site, previously]
posted by Kattullus
on Oct 26, 2011 -
5 comments
Waukeshocker! After Tuesday's painfully close, still undecided Supreme Court race between JoAnne Kloppenburg and David Prosser, Republicans warned that partisan election officials in certain municipalities might conveniently find bushels of extra uncounted votes after the fact.
It has come to pass -- but the extra votes were found in deep-red Waukesha County, represnting the entire city of Brookfield, and give GOP favorite David Prosser a probably insurmountable 50.2%/48.8% lead. Waukesha County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus's policy of storing election returns on a personal computer in her office with no backup
was criticized last August. Nate Silver says
the new numbers look reasonable.
posted by escabeche
on Apr 7, 2011 -
255 comments
A week ago, University of Wisconsin History Professor Bill Cronon wrote a
blog post about the organization he claimed was driving much of the legislation in Wisconsin:
ALEC. Shortly after that, he wrote an
op ed for the New York Times about the legislation.
Now, the Wisconsin GOP have sent a FOIA request to the University requesting all emails that Cronon may have sent containing the terms "Republican, Scott Walker, recall, collective bargaining, AFSCME, WEAC, rally, union ..." and others. Cronon
responds, calling it an "Attack [on] academic freedom". (via
TPM)
posted by demiurge
on Mar 25, 2011 -
119 comments
In over 35 years of friendship and conversation, Walter Michaels and I have disagreed on only two things, and one of them was faculty and graduate student unionization. He has always been for and I had always been against. I say “had” because I recently flipped and what flipped me, pure and simple, was Wisconsin.
When I think about the reasons (too honorific a word) for my previous posture I become embarrassed. ... The big reason was the feeling — hardly thought through sufficiently to be called a conviction — that someone with an advanced degree and scholarly publications should not be in the same category as factory workers with lunch boxes and hard hats. Wisconsin has taught Stanley Fish that academics are workers too. Marc Bousquet (author of
How the University Works) responds at the
Chronicle of Higher Education with
five lessons for academics from Wisconsin.
posted by gerryblog
on Mar 23, 2011 -
48 comments
Anonymous announces action against Koch brothers. Anonymous, apparently decided to stand up for something. They have announced their intention to use their internet powers for "good" and to "spread the word of the Koch brothers' political manipulation, their single-minded intent and the insidious truth of their actions in Wisconsin, for all to witness."
I for one, welcome our new anonymous rulers. (via
Reddit)
posted by daq
on Feb 26, 2011 -
176 comments
Sam Hengel, a 15-year-old student at Marinette High School in Wisconsin, held a classroom of 23 students and a teacher hostage on Monday, November 28th. Without making any demands from police, Hengel released the hostages and shot himself. Early Tuesday morning, Hengel died in the hospital. (
1,
2)
[more inside]
posted by MHPlost
on Nov 30, 2010 -
95 comments
“No, no. Academia is now part of the real world. Everything goes.” Just before dawn, on August 24, 1970, Dwight and Karl Armstrong, Leo Burt, and David Fine
parked a van outside Sterling Hall at the University of Wisconsin. The van was filled with ammonium nitrate and fuel oil, and
when it blew, it killed
Robert Fassnacht, a young physicist working through the night. The Army Mathematics Research Center, the bombing's target, was untouched. The bombers, known as the "New Year's Gang," went underground, and enthusiasm for the radical movement in Madison was permanently dampened.
The University of Wisconsin collection of transcribed interviews about the Sterling Hall Bombing.
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posted by escabeche
on Aug 21, 2010 -
32 comments
Prophetic Pictures from Menominie, Wisconsin. In 1905, high school senior Albert Hansen took photogaphs of his graduating classmates at Menominie HS. Not as they were -- but as they believed, or hoped, or feared they would be in the decades to come.
Dorothy M. Jesse was going to be a mathematician, and
Fred Quilling a pharmacist.
Alice M. Tilleson would be a prominent socialite, whose "eccentric ideas with reference to danger, force her to cling to that old fashioned vehicle, the automobile, instead of the new wheel-less aerial motor car." William C. Klatt, a future physician,
would operate on disembodied heads. And Hansen himself
was destined for the hobo's life. The Wisconsin Historical Society has
the whole collection available online, together with the text from the yearbook and the truth, as best the Society could learn, of how the graduates' actual future compared with prophecy. (Spoiler: Fred Quilling really did become a pharmacist.) Just one of the many remarkable collections at
Wisconsin Historical Images.
posted by escabeche
on Feb 7, 2010 -
25 comments
What's a Coastie? Two University of Wisconsin undergrads record and post to YouTube an ode to
"Coasties," out-of-state students who live in expensive off-campus apartments, wear Spandex tights with Uggs, spend their parents' money on designer handbags and Starbucks, and -- oh yeah, like 15% of their classmates but only 1 in 200 Wisconsin natives,
are Jews.
Controversy ensues.
posted by escabeche
on Dec 24, 2009 -
143 comments
The town of Shawano, WI claims a
local group with a history of controversy called the
Samanta Roy Institute of Science & Technology (SIST) profiled in this WSAW TV investigative series (
part 1,
part 2,
part 3 &
part 4) is a
murderous cult that tried to hire a hitman to assassinate 60 prominent citizens including the mayor, city administrator, city treasurer, city attorney, police chief, judges, investigators & fire commissioners. SIST returns the favor & claims it's the mayor who's running a cult (
part 1,
part 2 &
more), calling her the Minister of Propaganda. As a CBS investigative team found out,
things are tense in this sleepy town. The FBI
says it's keeping an eye on the situation.
posted by scalefree
on Dec 18, 2008 -
28 comments
The Mediocre Samaritan is a bittersweetly funny film fictionalization of an event that took place in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin on February 21, 2007. Produced by J. Elvis Weinstein of MST3K, Stinkburger Inc. and Cinematic Titanic fame.
(Event detailed previously on Metafilter. Also, NSFW for a couple seconds of pasty, naked male butt and tactfully censored footage of Casa de Culo.)
posted by cog_nate
on May 7, 2008 -
14 comments
Dr Evermor's Art Park featuring the world's largest scrap metal sculpture, the
Forevertron, is one of the most impressive metalwork collections I've ever seen. Great write up on the place over at Neatorama with tons of pix.
posted by jonson
on Sep 11, 2007 -
15 comments
The partial veto , enshrined in the Wisconsin Constitution since 1930, gives the governor the power to veto only a portion of a bill passed by the legislature. Since then, governors, both Republican and Democratic, have gotten
increasingly creative about its application -- vetoing the word "not" to reverse the meaning of a bill, vetoing digits out of numbers to reduce appropriations, even vetoing individual letters from words in order to create new text,
Humument-style. (This last power, the so-called "Vanna White" veto, was removed by Constitutional amendment in 1990.) Another attempt to strip the governor of the partial veto has just
failed. Doesn't it sound like fun to be governor of Wisconsin?
Try it yourself.
posted by escabeche
on Mar 12, 2007 -
33 comments
Tom Hignite wasn't content owning one of Wisconsin's most successful companies, Miracle Homes. The evangelical contracting magnate had a dream. He would be the
Walt Disney(sound) of the 21st century. So he turned a portion of his 7,000 square foot house into a studio, hired a crew of veteran Disney and Warner Bros. animators, and proceeded to make a
feature film QT starring his own creation,
Miracle Mouse. This is the story of
how it all went wrong.
posted by maryh
on Dec 10, 2006 -
54 comments
