The crowd begins to gather outside the United Wisconsin office for a pre-rally, one of several prior to gathering at the Capitol building:
The first speaker was Sue Gootsan, one of United Wisconsin's County Co-ordinators (no, right-wing anger addicts, some people volunteer without pay for things they believe in no matter how any of your heroes project themselves onto us):
Mahlon Mitchell, President of the Professional Fire Fighters of Wisconsin, commonly spoken of as a likely challenger to Rebecca Kleefisch for the Lieutenant-Governor post, possible future star of infamous attack ads such as "don't vote for Mitchell: he has a history of smashing down front doors with an axe and abducting people from their houses! (* if they're on fire)":
Peter Barca, when trying to get the crowd to say "We recall!" as response to what we do about of the likes of Walker, was instead met with cries of "We run for Governor!":
John Nichols showed his detailed knowledge of Wisconsin history, making the point that it's wrong to talk about the Republicans turning the clock back 100 years because in 1912 Wisconsin was busy showing the rest of the country what progressivism was all about:
There seems to be a statute somewhere that says if you visit the Capitol, you must take a picture of Forward, so I'm not taking any chances:
You've probably seen that poster in other photos, here it is blown up because I do so like it:
Naturally, a huge fraction of the population really adores the FitzWalkeri regime for passing Act 10 illegally in the dead of night. Hordes of them also swarmed the area to support Walker, vocally complaining that the legislative minority were somehow responsible for an International Treaty-violating mining bill not passing thus not causing a certain number of jobs whose sole source was a claim by the company that wrote the legislation which was looking for an excuse not to go ahead with the project anyway because of a glut in the iron ore market.
In the interests of objective fairness, I don't want to under-emphasize this horde's presence. In the other images in this diary I have devoted 2,226,254 pixels to the 62,000 who were there to protest the FitzWalkeri regime. So that no-one can accuse me of bias, I shall round up rather than down this horde's fair share of pixels, scaled by crowd size:
(That's a 6x6 image if you're wondering; click for the full size image).
Some more of my 61,999 friends who were there. Hello 61,999 friends!:
One year ago, it felt like the FitzWalkeri regime had its boot firmly on the throat of open government, the rule of law, the Constitution and the people of Wisconsin. There's an awful lot of work yet to do, but damn it, what a difference a year makes!
(In case you haven't found them before, more stories of yesterday's rally were created by Puddytat, Mark E Andersen, noise of rain, Giles Goat Boy, ruleoflaw).
Oops, I forgot to add this before: donate to Lori Compas who's lining up to replace Senate majority leader Scott Fitzgerald; or the other soon-to-be-Senators.