there's a new and improved little dust-up undertaken by those stalwarts of the wisconsin gop against william cronon. dippin alluded to it above. but i just saw cronon's blog entry from 15 march---which is what sent the wisconsin gop into a snit---and it's really quite interesting. the premise is that as much as the prank call to walker of a few weeks ago revealed about the role of those billionaire reactionary oligarchs the koch brothers, cronon just couldn't quite believe that all this legislative activity was organized by them alone. so he began to dig around and produced this interesting little x-ray of the contemporary rightwing landscape.
Who’s Really Behind Recent Republican Legislation in Wisconsin and Elsewhere? (Hint: It Didn’t Start Here) | Scholar as Citizen
i'll simply post the link because the entry is sourced extensively with hotlinks and is well worth the time to read and expand that way.
the central semi-visible institutional player in this that's not been public to now really is the American Legislative Exchange Council. reading about these reactionary assholes is a salutary exercise. enjoy.
now, as i think has been discussed in passing above already, the wisconsin gop wants to foia cronon's emails:
Wis. GOP FOIAs Emails of State University Prof Critical Of Gov. Walker | TPMDC
here's cronon's response:
Abusing Open Records to Attack Academic Freedom | Scholar as Citizen
i continue to think that the republicans have significantly overplayed their hand in these efforts to indulge good old fashioned right-wing style union busting and have galvanized a quite significant population against them and in all likelihood have done themselves more damage than they know.
i think there was a discussion about this earlier in the thread, now that i think about it---but the links here are interesting. cronon's response is from thursday (the 24th).