While the new permitting/rally system downtown is being hashed out, things have quieted a bit. Next Saturday is slated to be an *enormous* rally, with farmers converging on the Capitol from around the state. In the meantime, apparently the DOA is up to its old tricks, trying to suppress democracy with trickery.

Sigh.

They’re catching a ton of flack for outright fabricating their ‘damage’ estimate before a judge during the process of sorting out precisely what restrictions were allowed on closing/opening the Capitol itself. Politifact, which has leaned more than a little toward Walker in terms of bias, went so far as to label their initial, and laughable, 7.5 million dollar damage estimate a ‘Pants on Fire’ grade lie.

Keep in mind, that lie was told in court.

We went downtown on Monday, had a very regrettable lunch at Flavor of India that later made both the art director and myself sick, and then realized we couldn’t get into the Capitol because I had once again put a half inch swiss army knife on my lanyard and wasn’t willing to surrender it to the cops again. I really do resent having my personal effects sorted and catalogued like a criminal going into county just to visit my own government. So we took a few pictures and went back home. Then today got sidelined with the art director in particular feeling ill.

Lesson learned: do not eat at Flavor of India. Seriously. Don’t do it.

I’ve finally gotten around to working on our convention schedule. Honestly, this whole Madison being the center of the social justice movement thing presents some unique challenges and opportunities for us. The ZRC can get some good protest practice in, and we get to spread our message to a lot of people without leaving our home town. On the other hand, we don’t get to interact nearly as much with the very people who most influence the national discussion about Zombies, the creative personalities we’ve had such success talking with at conventions and so forth.

I imagine we’ll go to several of those over the spring and summer though. In the meantime, although I’ve volunteered to help with the recall, nobody’s contacted me, so I guess they have enough signature gatherers for now.

Below I’ll embed some of the handful of pictures I took on Monday, mostly of a neat art installation put up near the Capitol. The set for Monday is here, the collection of all pictures to date is here, and the ZRC’s Youtube channel, which is full to bursting with protest videos, is here. Enjoy!

(This is a neat interactive/collaborative art project up near the Capitol on Monday)

(You take string from this bucket and…)

(Add your own loop to the set already present. Solidarity, see? Interesting.)

Tags: Madison Protests

This entry was posted by John Sears on Wednesday, March 9th, 2011 at 12:23 am and is filed under ZRC News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.