Local law enforcement, including those who have come in from out of town to work at the Capitol, have been unfailingly nice, and supportive of the peaceful protests. Setting up the possibility of a situation with outside entities coming in to foment unrest has really rankled them.

Caldwell wanted to use a small part of the resources the Congress provided him, a $6 million psy-ops team, on Congress to in turn convince Congress to provide him with even more resources. While outrageous, this is basically just a very small scale version of how defense contractors in the military-industrial complex use political donations in the expanding growth spiral.

he Assembly Democrats have presented an alternative budget proposal and are meeting with the head of the Department of Administration, Mike Huebsch. We’re trying to get a copy of the alternative proposal, but I’m not sure they’ll have any more success with that as they’ve had with their litany of amendments on the floor of the Assembly. All of them have been defeated. The most recent one were amendments that would have removed the collective bargaining limitations from the bill.

However, Huebsch is a member of Scott Walker’s cabinet. The fact of the meeting itself is pretty notable.

If the facts are as alleged, 20-year-old Saudi citizen Khalid Ali-M Aldawsari sounds like a potentially much more dangerous person than the number of aspirational terrorists the FBI has entrapped of late. So I am grateful that Con-Way freight officials alerted the Lubbock Police Department when Aldawsari attempted to have them receive his shipment of phenol, an ingredient in picric acid.

The prank phone call to Gov. Scott Walker by a man pretending to be billionaire industrialist David Koch has become a real tipping point. I don’t know how the national media has reacted to it, but the state media was seriously aggressive in yesterday’s inexplicable press conference.

News from inside Libya remains chaotic. Gaddafi has phoned in a speech to Libyan television that repeated much of his earlier rant but added: “It is obvious now that this issue is run by al-Qaeda.”

Members of a disability rights group have occupied the Wisconsin Republican Party headquarters in Madison, and vow to stay until Governor Scott Walker takes out the Medicaid provisions in the budget repair bill.

For years, right-wingers have been carefully honing their own crazy version of history, and we saw a couple of particularly awesome examples yesterday, this one from The Frothy Mixture.

Obama in 2007: “And understand this: If American workers are being denied their right to organize and collectively bargain when I’m in the White House, I will put on a comfortable pair of shoes myself, I’ll will walk on that picket line with you as President of the United States of America. Because workers deserve to know that somebody is standing in their corner.”

The organization Courage to Resist has had a PayPal account since 2006 to allow supporters to make donations. They claim to have had few issues with PayPal over the years–until recently. Soon after encouraging people to use the online payment service to make donations to help fund the “Stand with Bradley Manning” petition effort, that account was frozen by PayPal.