MADISON, WI (FDL) – While having dinner last night inside a building with a bank of windows facing the state house, we saw a coterie of hundreds of cops marching into the building. Once inside, they told the crowd assembled that they were ordered to kick the protesters out of the Capitol, but instead they’d be sleeping overnight with them.

In one of the local Kansas City area school districts, a proposed levy increase that would have put an end to three years of major budget cuts failed, and so the cuts continue even as enrollment rises. In Wisconsin and elsewhere, cuts are driven not so much by the economy but by union-busting politicians. Elsewhere in the US, teacher layoffs are being announced. ‘Tis the season . . .

And yet, despite all this, the teachers still teach.

I am so grateful for those who taught me, and even today I am still realizing just how much of a gift they gave me.

A New York Times story published Thursday documents US plans to withdraw from the Pech Valley in Kunar Province of eastern Afghanistan. As the Times notes, this is a significant withdrawal from an area previously touted as one of the most important in the war in Afghanistan and is an area where over a hundred US troops have died. Remarkably, there is a rare bit of self-awareness in this move, as the US is admitting that it is our presence there that destabilizes the area. Like the unwelcome guest who keeps breaking things but just won’t leave, US behavior in Afghanistan to this point has had a huge component of destabilizing areas while producing no real benefit.

The forces of greed and selfishness, as upheld by corporate focus-group-tested propaganda in the US and with guns in certain other parts of the world, hit a few speed bumps this week.

On Friday demonstrators returned to Tahrir Square and the Parliament Building in Cairo to mark their recent victory and demand more immediate changes including the dismissal of Prime Minister Shafiq, and demanding the release of political prisoners and prosecution of those responsible for killing and torturing protesters. As evening fell, army officers arrived, attacked the protesters at the Parliament and insisted the one in Tahrir clear the area – there are unconfirmed reports that they were threatened with death if they did not disperse.

What’s going in your world? Anything new and exciting? If there is, please share… we would love to know what’s happening.

Alan Arkin and The Bun-Bun Brothers — Zip-A-Dee-Do-Dah, from The Muppet Show, episode 420.

Sometimes, it’s good to leave detached, cerebral meta-analyses of politics aside and just get a taste of public opinion being expressed the old-fashioned way.

Wisconsin State Senator Tim Carpenter asks Gov. Walker to resign because of what was revealed on the fake Koch call

The Iraq War, by itself, has done far graver harm to the interests of the United States than all of the cables Julian Assange has leaked.