Madison, WI . Democracy in action.

I drove the 110 miles south of where I live to go see first hand what the ruckus was all about down in Madison, WI. I'm not going to get into the details of THE BILL, but anybody who wants to know about it can easily find out. Just google "walker wisconsin budget repair bill" and you will get more than you ever wished for. If you have FaceBook, this link sums up things rather nicely from my perspective.
My goal for this posting was to just get some pics and see where the day would take me.

I took my bike with me as it was great February day in WI. 30-35 degrees and sunny. Most all of the snow had melted off from the few warm days we had just experienced so I could ride the bike most anywhere I desired.
While riding the 2-3 miles to the Capital building, I started seeing folks walking to a large area. There were buses involved, so I thought it was a staging area for one of the 2 sides that were involved in the political debate.
I was wrong! It was a some kind of fund raiser, WI style.




Further along the bike route the Capital building came into view.
Following are just a flavor of the various signs that people were carrying.
The Union supporters had the most varied and shall I say interesting signs. See if you can tell which signs go with which faction.



Now this was an interesting guy. He was standing on the curb trying to get his point across to the Union protesters. Most of the Bill supporters weren't there to try to out shout the opposition, but to show physical support for the Governor and his Bill.
Security was there to make sure there weren't any serious confrontations. A few folks for the other side stopped marching long enough to give him and some others a piece of their minds, but all in all nobody got out of hand.
Crowd estimates were somewhere between 60-70 thousand. The Union marchers had all but 10 thousand of that, so it was really pointless to try to out shout them, but some tried.



This guy was very proud of his sign. Not sure the Gov. of WI can be compared to these chaps. Say, did he leave out any Cuban or Central American dictators?

2 guys tried to disable a speaker for the TEA Party, a group formed to reduce the size of National Government, combat debt and bring back fiscal responsibility.
No arrests were reported on the day, so they must have left the 2 would be vandals walk. I was somewhat surprised to see that they were as old as they were.
I have to be careful how much I crop my iPhone pics, they down load rotated.

WI Super Bowl party. Why should Green Bay have all the fun?


Maybe he was at the wrong rally.
This maybe made the most sense of all. I had just finshed up a couple beers with some friends that were supporting the Unions (I am a TEA Party supporter) when I was riding back to my Jeep and I go this shot. I had talked to a number of folks throughout the day from both sides about this topic. Greedy Rich are resident in all political parties, are we really just pawns?