The Peristaltic Testator

My little ALEC study guide succeeded beyond my wildest dreams. Within two days, the blog had received over half a million hits, had been read by tens of thousands of people, had been linked by newspapers all over the United States, and had been visited by people from more than two dozen foreign countries. . . .

What I did not anticipate—though I guess I should have seen it coming, given everything else that has happened in Wisconsin over the past couple months—was the communication that the University of Wisconsin-Madison received on Thursday afternoon, March 17—less than two days after I posted my blog—formally requesting under the state’s Open Records Law copies of all emails sent from or received by my University of Wisconsin—Madison email address pertaining to matters raised in my blog.

It doesn’t take a great leap of logic to infer that Mr. Thompson and his colleagues aren’t particularly eager to have a state university professor asking awkward questions about the dealings of state Republicans with the American Legislative Exchange Council. This open records request apparently seemed to Mr. Thompson to be a good way to discourage me from sticking my nose in places he doesn’t think it belongs.

I confess that I’m surprised to find myself in this strange position, since (as I said in my earlier blog post) my professional interest as a historian has always been to research and understand the full spectrum of American political opinion. I often spend as much time defending Republican and conservative points of view to my liberal friends as vice versa. (For what it’s worth, I have never belonged to either party.) But Mr. Thompson obviously read my blog post as an all-out attack on the interests of his party, and his open records request seems designed to give him what he hopes will be ammunition he can use to embarrass, undermine, and ultimately silence me.

One obvious conclusion I draw is that my study guide about the role of ALEC in Wisconsin politics must come pretty close to hitting a bull’s-eye. Why else would the Republican Party of Wisconsin feel the need to single out a lone university professor for such uncomfortable attention?

According to an embedded MS Word document found in one of the HB Gary emails, it involves creating an army of sockpuppets, with sophisticated "persona management" software that allows a small team of only a few people to appear to be many, while keeping the personas from accidentally cross-contaminating each other. Then, to top it off, the team can actually automate some functions so one persona can appear to be an entire Brooks Brothers riot online.

I think you may be looking for this:

Public Notice, an independent organization dedicated to reducing
government spending. Learn more at The Public Notice dot org;

Our goal is to provide Americans with clear, unbiased, and useful information about key economic and fiscal issues. Because America's future should rest in the capable hands of a knowledgeable people.

Public Notice is an independent non-profit dedicated to providing facts and insight on the economy and how government policy affects Americans’ financial well-being.

Through education and awareness projects, Public Notice engages Americans on today’s policies, to avoid tomorrow’s problems.

Americans, empowered with the facts, can lead Washington to be better stewards of the nation’s economic and fiscal future.

The Overlordess Herself

A former Bush administration PR specialist has launched a new non-profit designed to raise the alarm about what it sees as "over-spending" in Washington -- but is staying mum on how the group is being funded. . . .

Public Notice's funding source remains obscure. In an interview with TPMmuckraker, Hamel -- who served as the Bush administration's top spokesperson on trade issues, and as press secretary for the House Republican Conference -- said Public Notice had "dozens of donors across the U.S.," but declined to identify them. "We will not be disclosing our donors," she said. "We want to protect the anonymity of our donors," she added, noting that other organizations of all political stripes take a similar stance.

Funding for this public radio programming comes from The Public Notice, an agency that would like to kill and bury public radio.

The scene shook me deeply: Was the harassment of an unpopular speaker the legacy of the Berkeley-campus Free Speech Movement, when students demanded the right to canvass for any and all political causes on the campus's Sproul Plaza? Wasn't free speech a liberal value? How, I wondered, could this thought police call itself liberal?. . . . The few outspoken conservatives on the faculty, and the Reagan regents, raised their voices in support of Kirkpatrick's free speech rights. The liberals seemed to me to be defending censorship.

(David Brock, Blinded by the Right, Three Rivers Press, 2002, p. 4.)

( He rose in prominence, changing the course of American history as he ascended. )

In the Summer of 1983, smarting under what they called the "fiasco of the last 18 months", i.e. the Greenspan Commission and subsequent 1983 Reform, the Cato Institute convened a conference in Washington DC and subsequently published the papers in their Fall 1983 Cato Journal under the title Social Security: Continuing Crisis or Real Reform. One of those articles had the intriguing title of Social Security Reform: Achieving a 'Leninist' Strategy. In that article was laid out the long term plan alluded to in my comment quoted above, which plan focused in large part on convincing younger workers that Social Security just wouldn't be there for them. Cato not only accepted that plan it institutionalized it in what was then known as the Project on Social Security Privatization but now known as the Project on Social Security Choice. (Note the domain name: http://www.socialsecurity.org/about/index.html - they have staked a claim to Social Security itself)

(Emphasis from the article.)

X-Posted to the_recession.