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" MADISON, Wisc. \u2014 On Friday, Governor Scott Walker presided over the ceremonial lighting of the Christmas tree in the great rotunda of the state capitol, hard by the bust of Fightin&amp;#039; Bob LaFollette, which looked very much like it might leap from its pedestal and bite him in the balls. He dedicated the occasion to Wisconsin&amp;#039;s veterans, and he brought some of them with him. &amp;quot;THERE WILL BE NO MEDIA AVAILABILITY BEFORE OR AFTER THE EVENT,&amp;quot; the press release cautioned in big capital letters, so nobody could miss them. There were new rules in the state capitol that morning. There are new rules in the state capitol of Wisconsin on almost every morning these days. You see, ever since last winter, when Walker rammed through his assault on the state&amp;#039;s public workers, touching off a general uprising all over the state, and a specific one outside on his front lawn, many of his fellow citizens have taken to expressing in imaginative ways how much of a walking pustulation they believe their governor is, both inside and outside the capitol building. So, in the interest of not being told to his face what a walking pustulation he is, Walker and his Department of Administration have concocted a veritable symphony of pettiness to drown out the noise. You have to hold a sign saying what a walking pustulation you think the governor is. If you secure your sign saying what a walking pustulation you think the governor is to a railing or to a banister, that is no longer a &amp;quot;sign,&amp;quot; that is considered an &amp;quot;exhibit,&amp;quot; and you are liable, if you don&amp;#039;t take it down, to get hauled off by the capitol cops. People have been busted for wearing the Bill of Rights around their necks. One girl was removed from the legislative gallery because she opened her civics textbook to read, and someone thought she was making a statement about what a walking pustulation she thought Scott Walker was. I am not making these stories up. This day&amp;#039;s new rule was a doozy. Henceforth, according to the governor&amp;#039;s office, anyone wishing to stage &amp;quot;an event&amp;quot; in the capitol would have to pay for the cost of the capitol police at a rate of $50 an hour, per officer. Moreover, the people organizing the &amp;quot;event&amp;quot; also would be liable for any clean-up costs. (Walker&amp;#039;s administration already has been caught inflating the cost of cleaning up after last winter&amp;#039;s mass demonstrations at the capitol.) You might also have to post an insurance bond in advance. Yes, in Scott Walker&amp;#039;s Wisconsin, your First Amendment rights come with a security deposit. And thus did Scott Walker, governor of Wisconsin, securely armored in bureaucratic chickenshit and surrounded by aging veterans functioning as human shields against the people who have come to believe him a walking pustulation, inaugurate the festive holiday season in the people&amp;#039;s capitol building. At 8:15.  In the morning. What a guy. The problem with doing this in Wisconsin is that, even if the state did elect Walker in 2010, and even if it did give the boot to Russ Feingold in favor of installing a nebbish named Ron Johnson in his Senate seat, the state has a long history of citizen politics and progressive political reforms of which it is just as proud as Louisiana is of its own long history of larceny and brigandage. It led the country in developing a system of referenda, of the direct primary, and, yes, of the recall election, all of which were designed to break the power of large corporations over the political system, and to prevent, if possible, the wholesale purchase of politicians by business interests that didn&amp;#039;t have the best interest of the general public at heart. When Walker got elected, and then began enacting his agenda, and then began enacting laws that would make it more difficult to reverse that agenda if the people decided he was a walking pustulation and chose to boot him out \u2014 Wisconsin now has one of those pernicious voter-ID requirements, with which the Walker administration already has tried to do some mischief \u2014 something strong and angry echoed up out of history. It has spread to all corners of the state. The atmosphere in Wisconsin is almost comically politicized. The main effort around here is aimed at gathering the necessary 540,000-plus signatures required to force a recall election on Walker himself, so that the state can say clearly how much of a walking pustulation it thinks he is. That was what brought Larry Deutsch, a retired economics professor from the University of Wisconsin at Parkside, to the parking lot of Lina&amp;#039;s, a grocery store on Milwaukee&amp;#039;s north side. (Lina&amp;#039;s is a legend in the community because, among its other services, it runs a van that will give a ride to and from the store to any customer who cannot drive or does not have a car.) Deutsch stood at a small wooden podium just outside the door, a rack of signature petitions in front of him, buttonholing people coming in and out of Lina&amp;#039;s. It is the beginning of his second week at this location, him and his partner, a woman named (of all things) Chris Christie, and who is very tired of the jokes, thank you very much. &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;re trying to move around in the inner city as much as we can,&amp;quot; Christie said. &amp;quot;There&amp;#039;s a large Democratic vote and a lot of people don&amp;#039;t have a way to get anywhere else, so we have to come to them.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;They&amp;#039;re all very angry about what&amp;#039;s been done to them,&amp;quot; Deutsch said. &amp;quot;The voter-ID law hits them particularly hard because about half of these people have no driver&amp;#039;s licenses and they have to get the separate voter ID, which requires them to have a birth certificate, which many of them don&amp;#039;t have. This has really been a bad year for them, and it&amp;#039;s going to take a long time to recover from. &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;ve had a wonderful progressive tradition here, and that&amp;#039;s why I feel so wounded by this. I grew up here. I brag about Wisconsin&amp;#039;s clean politics and progressive tradition. Progressive tax structure was sort of invented here.&amp;quot; Bobbie and Ruby Adell worked the parking lot, one car at a time, rapping insistently on windows until someone rolled one down and agreed to sign. Bobbie is a member of an SEIU local and Ruby is her daughter, whom she dragooned into helping her. &amp;quot;They been asking me if they&amp;#039;re still giving out ID&amp;#039;s and are they still free, and I&amp;#039;ve been telling them as far as I know, they are,&amp;quot; Ruby explained. &amp;quot;They&amp;#039;re hoping their votes count. They don&amp;#039;t want to be cheated. They&amp;#039;re making sure their signatures down correctly, and their printing down correctly, everything down on the paper correctly, so it can count.&amp;quot; The effort to recall Walker \u2014 which is being run formally by a group called United Wisconsin \u2014 is only one part of the general political energy that has energized the state over the past year. It is its most visible manifestation. It has done a remarkable job getting its people organized. They are omnipresent now. At the Marquette-Wisconsin basketball game on Saturday afternoon, there was a team collecting signatures at every gate of the Kohl Center in Madison. In St. Francis, there were two people working a fruit stand. In their first two weeks of their 60-day window, they had collected 340,000 signatures, including several thousand from remote, rural counties in the central and northern part of the state. In places like Pierce and Oneida counties, where Walker ran strong in 2010, the effort gathered easily more than the 25 percent of the 2010 turnout that is the statewide threshold for forcing the recall. Still, though, there is an amorphous feeling among many activists that even if the recall effort may well succeed, it might drain the momentum behind even more sweeping reforms. After all, even if Walker is chased out of office, the laws he managed to get passed \u2014 including a genuinely horrific mining bill now rolling through the legislature that would have the effect of clear-cutting a lot of Wisconsin&amp;#039;s signature environmental protections \u2014 will still be in effect. The effect of his governorship will live on no matter how it comes to an end. There is something of a divide between United Wisconsin \u2014 which one activist scoffed at as a &amp;quot;Democratic party front group&amp;quot; \u2014 and the mass of other activists who have rallied here since last winter behind an assortment of causes, including the nascent Occupy Madison movement that is set up in a parking lot down East Washington Street from the capitol, even though most of the people in the encampment and elsewhere are also collecting signatures. The recall effort, it appears, is a focus for the political ferment, but far from its ultimate goal. On the balcony above the tree that Scott Walker bravely came out to light when practically nobody was watching, Jason Huberty has hung six giant signs, each with one letter, and spelling out &amp;quot;RECALL&amp;quot; over the bust of Fightin&amp;#039; Bob. Huberty has been arrested half-a-dozen times, and he has each summons laminated and will show them to you, if you ask. He has secured his signs by tying them off to plastic bottles full of water in the floor behind the balcony railing. This, of course, makes them an &amp;quot;exhibit,&amp;quot; and not signs, so the cops tell Jason that he has to have someone hold each sign, which will make them, well, &amp;quot;signs.&amp;quot; This is the way of things these days, as people try to explain to an unhearing Scott Walker what a walking pustulation they think he is. &amp;quot;The press doesn&amp;#039;t cover what&amp;#039;s really happening here, so we&amp;#039;re the coverage,&amp;quot; explained Nicole Schulte, a capitol regular. &amp;quot;Normally, the tree-lighting was at noon, but this year it was 8 a.m. Yesterday, he dropped a 26-page new set of rules basically suppressing free speech in the capitol.&amp;quot; At noon, just prior to another holiday event around the Christmas tree that Scott Walker courageously had come out to light at 8:15 that morning, the capitol police told Huberty that they would be taking his sign &amp;quot;for an hour&amp;quot; and then he could have it back, so that the giant word &amp;quot;RECALL&amp;quot; didn&amp;#039;t harsh too many mellows down among the kids who would be singing the carols. &amp;quot;I told them that would be okay,&amp;quot; Huberty said. &amp;quot;I didn&amp;#039;t want anyone to get arrested today.&amp;quot; The sign came down. When the program was over, he went down to the basement to pick it up again. On his way, he passed the bust of Fightin&amp;#039; Bob LaFollette, who, at the most white-hot moment of his career, when he was being accused of treason for opposing the entry of the United States into World War I, and who was facing expulsion from the Senate, rose in his own defense and said: Sir, until the sacrifices of every battle field consecrated to the establishment of representative government and of constitutional freedom shall be obliterated from the pages of history and forgotten of men, the plain citizenship of this country will jealously guard that liberty and that freedom and will not surrender it. History has its echoes, even in this place where sterile regulation is being used to shackle robust speech, which is breaking loose all over the rest of the state. It was a bright, beautiful afternoon. Outside, down the block, two men stood in front of the museum of Wisconsin history and they collected signatures to recall Scott Walker, proud promulgator of bad law and administrative chickenshit, early-morning lighter of Christmas trees, and, perhaps, walking pustulation on its last legs. CLICK HERE FOR MORE OF CHARLES P. PIERCE&amp;#039;S LONG READS &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt; Follow The Politics Blog on RSS and on the Twitter &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a11927/scott-walker-recall-effort-6610089/>