Mary Grabar on Wisconsin and the activist curriculum.

Despite all the accoutrements of 1960s protests – the drumming, chanting, human chains, sit-ins, sleep-ins, teach-ins, and teach-outs inside the Wisconsin capitol – the issue is the retention of political power through Big Education. Unions are necessary to maintain this power. The professors are using their classroom bully pulpits to shape “change agents” who will protect their jobs by picking up bullhorns and sleeping on the floors.

More on those “change agents” and their big, warm hearts here. For an overview of eroded academic probity, see Horowitz and Laksin’s One-Party Classroom.

Jeff Goldstein on incestuous funding circles.

The ‘collective bargaining’ being ‘busted’ here is a money-laundering scheme that has union leaders taking money from the taxpayers that the taxpayers can ill afford (and can’t themselves ‘bargain’ on), giving it to teachers in raises and benefits, collecting it back in forced union dues, and then funnelling that money back to the Democrat party at a rate of 96%.

And Stephen Hayes and John McCormack note the Wisconsin saga’s strange inversions.

The absurdity of the Democrats’ outrage was too much. They weren’t merely wrong on a procedural point. They were accusing Republicans of “making a mockery of democracy,” operating like a “banana republic,” and, in former labour secretary Robert Reich’s words, conducting a “coup d’état.” All the while, Democrats were hiding in another state trying to prevent a newly inaugurated senate from holding a vote on vital state business. But in the end, senate Republicans had found a way to vote. The Assembly passed the bill on Thursday. Scott Walker signed it into law on Friday. And that is what democracy actually looks like.

From here, inversion seems to have been a recurrent theme of events in Wisconsin. As when activist doctors invoked the virtue of “public service” while handing out fake sick notes to absentee teachers, thereby leaving the taxpayer with a multimillion-dollar bill for work not done. Maybe that’s the “social justice” we hear so much about.

One charming detail of the protest was this comment,

Walker doesn’t HAVE a college degree. ‘Nuff said. 

A theme eagerly seized upon by other brave defenders of The Working Joe. Strange how readily supposed egalitarians resort to class condescension.

 As usual, feel free to add your own.