spiderplanet

Saturday February 26 in Madison, there was a rally to oppose the 144 page economic bill proposed by Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker. What's going on in Wisconsin is too much to summarize, Here's a start.

At the rally, I took about 340 photos, sixty-eight of them are tolerable enough to post. Those sixty-eight photos are all at this photobucket page

Here are some of my favorites .

From Minneapolis to Wisconsin is about five hours. The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) local unions from Minneapolis and Saint Paul got a bus together to bring our members to Madison.

Here's a group photo of everyone who was not taking a picture, or otherwise avoiding being photographed.

I am not a fan of driving, and I'm not a fan of driving in the dark. The bus was a much nicer way to get to Madison and back. Many thanks to Minneapolis IBEW 292 Representative Dan McConnell for putting this together.

Here is our nice, comfy bus.

Enough about our group! Here are some of the photos from the rally.

Even Business Cat was there!

There were several signs about Governor Walker's rejection of funds for high speed rail. There's more about that in Blue Cheddar's blog entry, This is Why Wisconsin Can't Have Nice Things. Or Jobs. That blog entry also includes a few photos from Saturday's rally.

Minnesota has a state capitol with concrete gophers carved into everything, which is completely not weird at all. Strangely, Wisconsin has concrete badgers.

Here's another word on the issue of badgers.

It's really difficult to get a photo of 100,000 people. They never scrunch in enough to all get into the photo. I think I still got a few good photos that illustrate how many people were there. Here's what the inside of the rotunda looked like from the third floor.

The day before Saturday's rally, the police were ordered to remove the protesters from the capitol building by 4:00 PM. Uniformed police workers entered the building and issued the following statement:

"We have been ordered by the legislature to kick you all out... But we know what’s right from wrong. We will not be kicking anyone out. In fact, we will be sleeping here with you."

Here are some law enforcement workers inside the building.

More photos, and some pictures from the crowd outside the building.

This fellow played "Solidarity Forever" on his Saxophone, which was very nice. Saxophones are not the greatest at projecting sound, but they are more more pleasant sounding than vuvuzelas.