The passage of the Assembly version of the bill does not really move it any closer to final passage. As long as the Senate Democrats remain out of the state, nothing can move forward. But the passage does accomplish a couple things. First, as Donna Magdalena, a graphic artist from Madison, told me, “They didn’t want people to keep hearing what the Democrats were bringing up.” Assembly Democrats used the elongated session, the longest continuous debate on a bill in the history of the state by some accounts, to educate the public about the contents of the legislation. Now they won’t have the same platform on the Assembly floor.

But the bigger reason to get the bill passed in the Assembly is to shut down the Capitol. Under a bill passed yesterday, this could happen as soon as 6pm Saturday night.

Just hours after it was revealed that PayPal had frozen the account of the Bradley Manning Support Network, a group raising funds for alleged Wikileaker Pfc. Bradley Manning, the payment processing giant backed down after public pressure to restore access to the account.

In just 8 hours, more than 15,000 Firedoglake activists signed a letter to PayPal demanding the company “drop its unreasonable demands of the Bradley Manning Support Network and restore access to the group’s PayPal account.”

Many people have scoffed at any relationship between the life and death struggles in Egypt and elsewhere, and this peaceful protest in Madison. But Goodman, whose show “Democracy Now” will broadcast from the Capitol Rotunda today, rightly observed that the revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia were, at the core, labor uprisings.

Iraqis are planning to take to the streets this Friday in a mass Day of Wrath. Demonstrations from Sulimaniyah and Mosel in the North to Fallujah, Baghdad, Kut and Basra have called for an end to corruption and the provision of essential services as well as protection for the rights of journalists.

• It’s all going so well, isn’t it?
• The Beeb games out three scenarios in Libya.
• For Walker, some are more equal than others.
• Krugman: Shock doctrine, USA.
• Good luck with that, Willard.
• Getting crazier all the time.

FoxNews and big settlement checks, it’s the price of power and wankery I guess.

Graham Parker — Stick To The Plan, at the Narrows Center for the Arts, Fall River, MA, on April 20, 2007.

Little Davey P is busy lying to the people in Washington again. This morning, Nice Mike Hastings had a very interesting article at Rolling Stone. He described how Bad Billy C and Screaming Greg B made Lt. Col. Holmes do mind tricks on important Washington people who were visiting Afghanistan. Mr. Jim explained it all right here and told us how Bad Billy C was probably doing this because Little Davey P wanted him to.

But now, Little Davey P is acting like he had nothing to do with the mind tricks and is calling for Bad Billy C to be investigated.

Can Republicans successfully exploit voters anger about the health care law in 2012 like they did in 2010 if large parts of the electorate thinks the law is already gone?

The Pakistanis are making a concerted effort to make it clear (or claim) that they let these thousands into the country with no vetting without first ascertaining what they would be doing. Mind you, they probably did know, at least vaguely. But if these numbers are true, the sheer scope of this program may be one of the big sources of the embarrassment here.