With history unfolding in Madison, Wisconsin over the past few days, I’ve written a number of articles describing the scene.

Here’s an op-ed I wrote for the New York Times giving a basic breakdown of the issue:

So far, Walker’s plans have been fiscally modest, but politically bold. Public employee unions will continue to protest, even though the governor is the first politician who has told them the truth in ages. If government workers continue to call his bluff, their protests will likely be much smaller in the future.

Here’s a column I wrote for the National Review Online discussing teachers’ use of their students in the protests:

In the meantime, the capitol was packed with thousands of government employees, many of whom had staged a “sleep-in” the night before. One sign-wielding protester approached a tie-wearing GOP staffer and sneered, “You must be a Republican.” He turned and asked, “Because I’m working?”

The raucous, drum-beating crowd was mostly made up of teachers, high-school kids, and University of Wisconsin students. On Thursday, school districts all over the state began canceling classes as their teachers called in sick en masse — government-employee strikes are illegal in Wisconsin — and teachers continued to bring their students to protest with them.

I wrote this column for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that ran on Thursday:

Yet if you tell Democratic legislators that a vote against Walker’s plan is a vote to cut government jobs, they likely will look at you as if you just tried to stuff a live halibut into their mouths. They will tell you that there are many options available to balance the budget – options that are so popular, they enacted exactly zero of them in the last budget, when they had full control of state government. Their deficit-reduction plan consisted of hoping the Green Bay Packers won the Super Bowl, so people didn’t notice the giant hole in the state’s finances. (They got half their wish.)

In the Isthmus last week, I wrote about Wisconsin union leaders’ tendency to call people “whores.”

So, for the record, it appears Beil’s hierarchy of insults runs the gamut between “whore” (the worst), “prostitute” (not quite as bad) and “purveyor of the world’s oldest profession.” Yet some might even be tempted to include “paid union lobbyist” in their “pyramid of prostitution.” It’s a wonder Charlie Sheen hasn’t given Beil a call to go party in a hotel room.

And, of course, there are the updates I’ve written for WPRI – my column on Monday here and a blog post from last Friday here.

Stay tuned for more – should be more exciting developments to come.  And we’ll be there.

Granted, in the grand scheme of things, this is a minor quibble.  But, just for the record:

On December 16th, I received a tip from a friend to go check out what was going on at the UW-Fox Valley with regard to “green” parking spots.  As I wrote in this post, the students were organizing a cyber-backlash against campus dean Dr. James Perry, who suggested the campus should institute more “green” parking spots, which could only be used if students drove a low-emitting vehicle.

Fifteen days later, on New Year’s Eve, the Wisconsin State Journal issued this story – many parts which could have been cut and pasted directly from the WPRI post.  It contained no recognition,and no attribution for WPRI originally breaking the story.

Obviously, we wrote the post because we thought it was newsworthy – and it’s cool that larger media outlets picked up the story.  But a little courtesy would be welcome.

When revered members of the public pass away, some use the time to mourn.  Some use the time to reflect on that individual’s good deeds.  Liberal writer John Nichols, on the other hand, sees the death as a perfect time to take cheap shots at his political opponents.

In his column “Jack Kemp vs. the Party of No,” Nichols wastes no time cashing in on Kemp’s death:

Among the many tragedies of the contemporary Republican party is that the partisans who will honor the memory of former Congressman, cabinet member and 1996 vice presidential nominee Jack Kemp have refused so consistently and belligerantly [sic] to embrace the man’s wisest political insight.

“The only way to oppose a bad idea is to replace it with a good idea,” said Kemp, who worked harder than anyone else to make the GOP a positive force rather than the “party of no.”

Clearly, Nichols has been dutifully reading his Twitters (tweets?) from Harry Reid.  I’ve been searching for the article where Nichols chastises Democrats for being the “party of no” when opposing Republican initiatives during the recent era of full GOP control.  Surely, Nichols was bothered by the Democratic party being the “party of no” when opposing President Bush’s tax cuts or the War in Iraq.  Someone let me know when they find that article – I’ll be here, holding my breath.

Nichols goes on to wax rhapsodic about what chums he and Kemp were, in order to convince us that this article isn’t just an opportunistic hit job.  (Clearly, he fails in this endeavor.)  He tells us that Kemp was an ideal Republican because he played with black players in the NFL and was opposed to apartheid.  (Breaking dramatically from the strong pro-apartheid wing of today’s GOP, apparently.)  Nichols makes sure that we know he once “traveled with Mandela,” and looks up some instances where Kemp spoke on behalf of racial equality.  Wonderful.

I hereby challenge anyone to find anything positive about Jack Kemp uttered by John Nichols prior to his death.  In fact, on economics, Kemp disagrees with everything Nichols stands for and attacks in the modern Republican party.  Yet he would have us believe that his admiration for Kemp was so strong that he secretly pulled the voting lever for Dole/Kemp in 1996.  In fact, a Lexis-Nexis search shows Nichols mentioned Kemp in 25 pieces he wrote for the Madison Capital Times in 1995 and 1996, and in not once instance did he reference him favorably.  He once mockingly referred to Kemp as the “pied piper of supply-side economics.”  

When Kemp was alive, Nichols didn’t have much use for him.  But Kemp DEAD is a whole other story.

Of course, this is a common Nichols trick.  He picks his GOP favorites only when it allows him to level a cheap shot against the powers that be.  In 2002, he suddenly became a big fan of Republican Wisconsin State Senator Bob Welch when he found out Welch was thinking of challenging incumbent Scott McCallum in a primary.  Naturally, Welch’s candidacy would have weakened McCallum significantly, which is all the Cap Times really cared about.

In 2006, Nichols bemoaned Republican Scott Walker’s exit from the GOP gubernatorial primary, praising his “moderation” on ethics issues, health care issues, and taxation.  Naturally, this was merely an attempt to paint the remaining GOP candidate, Congressman Mark Green, as a bloodthirsty partisan.  But just ONE YEAR earlier, Nichols shredded Walker in a column, calling him a “bigot” who wanted to make it harder for people to vote, and his candidacy for governor  “very bad news for Wisconsin.” For the record, Walker never backed off his support of the constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, his support of carrying concealed weapons, or the Taxpayers’ Bill of Rights (TABOR), for which Nichols rips him.

But since the left’s’ strategy became contrasting Walker with Green, suddenly Walker became an ACLU card carrying member, Grateful Dead fan progressive. When he was in the race, he was a “pretty typical Wisconsin Republican,” but the second he left the race, he became “palatable even to moderate voters.”

Fortunately, in this case, Nichols corrected this mistake.  He decided to use a dead guy as a political prop, to be sure Kemp couldn’t speak for himself.  Some day (and I hope it’s a long, long, time from now), the John Nichols obituaries will be written.  Hopefully, at that point, someone will use his death as an example of how much more integrity liberal writers have than they did in 2009.

In our podcast last week, Marc Eisen and I discussed what would happen to political discourse when newspapers eventually fade away – specifically, how people will talk to one another about politics when all the news they read is news that they have hand-selected to suit their ideology.

This phenomenon has been dubbed “The Daily Me” by M.I.T.’s Nicholas Negroponte, via New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof:

When we go online, each of us is our own editor, our own gatekeeper. We select the kind of news and opinions that we care most about.

Nicholas Negroponte of M.I.T. has called this emerging news product The Daily Me. And if that’s the trend, God save us from ourselves.

That’s because there’s pretty good evidence that we generally don’t truly want good information – but rather information that confirms our prejudices. We may believe intellectually in the clash of opinions, but in practice we like to embed ourselves in the reassuring womb of an echo chamber.

One classic study sent mailings to Republicans and Democrats, offering them various kinds of political research, ostensibly from a neutral source. Both groups were most eager to receive intelligent arguments that strongly corroborated their pre-existing views.

(It is somewhat ironic that I am linking to a free online editorial that demonstrates exactly why newspapers are going under, and creating this self-selection process that I then decry. )

The irony is also not lost on me that someone that works for WPRI, a think tank with a conservative point of view, is complaining about people being able to get conservative information.  But we are in the persuasion business, and the newspapers are in a different business altogether – at some point, someone has to be the arbiter of what’s newsworthy, whether it fits our ideology or not.  We can all certainly work together – WPRI and and active media don’t have to be mutually exclusive.

I got back from being on the road for four days on Sunday, and began combing through the week’s news to see what I had missed. Naturally, the big story in Wisconsin was Milwaukee talk show host and blogger James T. Harris’ admonition to John McCain to “take it to” Barack Obama – which made national news.

Now, I recognize that this story has pretty much run its course, as it is five days old now. Stories in campaign season have the shelf life of mayonnaise in the sun – I might as well be writing about how the Bee Gees are bringing back the urban beard. But there is one aspect of this story that remains interesting to me.

As I scanned the web, I noticed this account of Harris’ confrontation with McCain as reported by the Washington Post:

“It is absolutely vital that you take it to Obama, that you hit him where it hits, there’s a soft spot,” said James T. Harris, a local radio talk show host, who urged the Republican nominee to use Barack Obama’s controversial former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., and others against him.

“We have the good Reverend Wright. We have [the Rev. Michael L.] Pfleger. We have all of these shady characters that have surrounded him,” Harris bellowed. “We have corruption here in Wisconsin and voting across the nation. I am begging you, sir. I am begging you. Take it to him.”

Is anything missing in that account? Maybe, maybe not. On this, I am torn.

You see, as Milwaukeeans know, James T. Harris is black. (Or, as he prefers, he is an “American of African descent.”) But the article doesn’t mention that fact. Should it have?

On the one hand, I think that in most cases the race of people identified in news articles is irrelevant. One of the first steps we can take to de-emphaisizing race in America is to wean ourselves off of constant racial identification.

On the other hand, race is often relevant to the crux of the story. This is especially true when crime suspects are still at large, and a description is needed. That’s why they provide a racial description in police reports – so when a gangland-style murder occurs at 27th and North in Milwaukee, the cops aren’t wasting their time chasing down the Osmond family. (Although it could be argued that the Osmonds have murdered good taste for a good 30 years now.)

But in this case, it would seem that Harris’ race was relevant. Clearly, the article was written to give the impression that this was an angry mob of Republicans, who tend to be white and older. Did they leave Harris’ race out of the story because that may have conflicted with the story they were trying to tell? Were they afraid of portraying an African-American as angry and bitter? Or were they purposely witholding a description of Harris because they didn’t want to send a message than an African-American could actually oppose Barack Obama?

So in some instances, I think it’s admirable for newspapers to move to less racial identification of the people they identify. As more and more members of diverse races procreate together, tagging an ethnic classification based on sight is likely getting to be more of a challenge anyway. But in the case of James T. Harris, it seems as though there was a systematic decision to withold a fact that would have added more complexity and depth to the story. And I guess we’ll never know why.