I SHOULDA BEEN THERE

Tom Morello and our good buddy Brother Wayne Kramer galvanize the troops in Wisconsin.

"On Monday night, Wisconsin’s week-long protest against Gov. Scott Walker got a soundtrack. Five thousand people squeezed into the Monona Terrace exhibition hall to hear Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine and Wayne Kramer of the MC5 curse Walker’s plan to undercut public employee unions. Walker got called every name in the book – “motherfucker,” “asshole” – but the acoustic show was still overwhelmingly peaceful and positive. Morello and friends focused on marshaling the protesters’ energy for continued resistance to the budget bill that would strip away unions’ collective bargaining rights. The predominantly young crowd batted around balloons and waved signs, some with defiant messages and others with almost self-mocking jokes. (My favorite: “Scott Walker Eats Kittens.”) Union representatives began by speaking about the cause, but none of them more passionately than Morello, who came on next as the night’s MC. In bright orange T-shirt and cap, he made a direct connection with the Cheesehead throng, taking on their cause as his own. “This has been the most inspiring 24 hours of my life!” he said, to deafening cheers. “You have your hand on the wheel of history!” (Click here for more)

Meanwhile someone in the mainstream finally tells it like it is. But you can trust Paul Krugman. He has Nobel Prize.

"Last week, in the face of protest demonstrations against Wisconsin’s new union-busting governor, Scott Walker — demonstrations that continued through the weekend, with huge crowds on Saturday — Representative Paul Ryan made an unintentionally apt comparison: “It’s like Cairo has moved to Madison.” It wasn’t the smartest thing for Mr. Ryan to say, since he probably didn’t mean to compare Mr. Walker, a fellow Republican, to Hosni Mubarak. Or maybe he did — after all, quite a few prominent conservatives, including Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Rick Santorum, denounced the uprising in Egypt and insist that President Obama should have helped the Mubarak regime suppress it. In any case, however, Mr. Ryan was more right than he knew. For what’s happening in Wisconsin isn’t about the state budget, despite Mr. Walker’s pretense that he’s just trying to be fiscally responsible. It is, instead, about power. What Mr. Walker and his backers are trying to do is to make Wisconsin — and eventually, America — less of a functioning democracy and more of a third-world-style oligarchy. And that’s why anyone who believes that we need some counterweight to the political power of big money should be on the demonstrators’ side." (Click here for more)

Click here for Wayne

The secret word is definitely Oligarch