One might ask Walker to join the 21st century or stop taking benefits on the government teat. Ask him loudly, in fact.

Again, Walker if Milwaukee can give your family health care benefits, so should domestic partners have the same right. In fact, Walker, what makes your wife, or your two kids more worthy of reasonable benefits than a domestic partner in a committed same sex relationship?

Cory Liebmann offers a much more eloquent response to Walker's ridiculousness.

Two Madison college professors with religious backgrounds, who have worked tirelessly to change the world, will be honored for their lifetimes of activism on Oct. 3 by the Wisconsin Network for Peace and Justice (WNPJ), a statewide network of 170 organizations working for social change.

Joe Elder, a Quaker peace activist who is a University of Wisconsin professor of sociology and Asian studies, and Esther Heffernan, O. P., a Dominican nun who is emerita professor of social science at Edgewood College, and a widely respected leader on prison reform and criminal justice issues, will receive Lifetime Achievement Awards at a reception following WNPJ’s annual fall assembly at the Goodman Community Center in Madison.

Seven others will be honored with Peacemakers of the Year awards. Two veterans, Iraq veteran Jason Moon, of Milwaukee, and Vietnam veteran Will Williams, of DeForest, won in the adult category.  Senior citizen winners are Elaine Kinch of the Racine Coalition for Peace and Justice and Don Hoffman of Rapids Citizens for Peace in Wisconsin Rapids. Youth awards will go to Dartanian Lewis of Milwaukee and Josh Bartz and Jannett Arenas, both of Madison, for volunteer work with WNPJ member organizations.

Esther Heffernan, 80, began her lifelong social activism in the 1940s as a University of Chicago student working for interracial justice.  She describes her research in a Washington, DC women’s prison as “life-changing.”  It resulted in, Making It in Prison: The “Square,” the “Cool” and “The Life,” published in 1972”, a book considered a seminal work in the field, which continues to serve as a resource to those who set corrections policy.

Her promise to the women in the Washington, DC prison to make their lives visible to others has shaped her deep involvement in criminal justice reform over the last several decades, especially on issues of women in prison and rehabilitation upon their release.

She is currently chair of the Task Force on Money, Education and Prisons, seeking change in Wisconsin’s criminal justice system; a board member of Family Connections that brings children monthly to visit their mothers at Taycheedah Correctional Facility; and a member of the Dane County Task Forces on Disproportionate Juvenile Minority Confinement and on Racial Discrimination in the Criminal Justice System.

Joe Elder, 79, informed his draft board during the Korean war that he would go to jail rather than be inducted. Two years later he became a Quaker. With other Quakers, he has carried secret messages between authorities in conflict in India and Pakistan; North Vietnam and Washington; North Korea and Washington; and Tamil Tiger militants and the government of Sri Lanka. 

During the Vietnam War, he delivered medical supplies a hospital in Hanoi, and after the war helped organize Madison Quakers, Inc. which has built a peace park and a school in My Lai, and provides micro-loans to village and ethnic women in Vietnam.

Deeply committed to internationalism, as a UW professor in Sociology and Languages and Cultures of Asia he has encouraged countless students to broaden their horizons, learn languages and live and study in other countries.  He has long served on Wisconsin's Governor's Commission on the United Nations.

Elder, also committed to inter-faith dialogue, in 1995 was one of the founders of the International Committee for the Peace Council that includes Nobel Peace Prize Laureates Mairead Maguire and the Dalai Lama. During the past decade the Peace Council has met in world trouble spots such as Chiapas and Jerusalem to listen, learn and provide an interfaith presence.

Peacemaker of the Year winners:

Jason Moon, 35, is a leader in Milwaukee’s chapter of Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW), Veterans for Peace (VFP) and the board of VFP’s Homeless Veterans Initiative to find and assist homeless veterans in the Milwaukee area.  He testified at the national Winter Soldier hearings in 2008, at which Iraq and Afghanistan veterans told of their experiences.

Will Williams, 65, a member of Madison’s Veterans for Peace chapter, uses his own experience in Vietnam to speak and counsel young people about the realities of military service and challenge promises of recruiters.  He has spoken across the state, linking peace, prison reform, and immigrant rights.  

Elaine Kinch, 70, Elaine was one of the founders of the Racine Coalition for Peace and Justice, and a member of the Central America Solidarity Coalition..She has traveled on peace missions to Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Chiapas and last winter to the Middle East, where she lived with a Palestinian family in Israel and helped harvest olives, to learn more about the situation there.

Don Hoffman, 70, a retired probation and parole officer, became a leader of Rapids Citizens for Peace in 2006, establishing monthly peace vigils on the bridge in Wisconsin Rapids.  .One of his projects was to get Democracy Now! on a local cable television station.

Dartanian Lewis, 13, a student at Blessed Savior Catholic School in Milwaukee, has been volunteering at Casa Maria Catholic Worker house for homeless families.  He has worked on a wide range of social justice issues – peace, worker rights, firearms violence, medical supplies for Cuba, protection of the rainforests, and help for Darfur. He sells fair trade chocolate at churches and events to raise money for those projects. 

Josh Bartz, 28, a board member of OutReach, Madison’s lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community center, created a program (OutThere) to address the need for youth programming and social and support opportunities for LGBT people ages 18-24. It has become  a weekly program of outings, games, discussion groups and movie nights.

Jannett Arenas, 22, a Madison Area Technical College and UW-Madison student, is a co-founder and organizer for Alcance, a student organization focused on supporting access to higher education for Madison area Latino youth.  She has helped to build the Madison Chapter of Voces de la Frontera, working on immigrant rights issues of in-state tuition, drivers cards, and the national DREAM Act to provide undocumented students a path to citizenship. 

The Peacemakers of the Year presentations will be at 3:15 p.m. on Oct. 3 at Goodman Community Center, 149 Waubesa St., Madison, at the conclusion of WNPJ’s annual Fall Assembly, which begins at 10 a.m.  A special reception to honor Joe Elder and Esther Heffernan will be held from 4:30 to 6:30 p.m. at the same location, with speakers and music and Capital Times columnist John Nichols as emcee.  All events are open to the public.

With Attorney General JB Van Hollen announcing last week he is refusing to perform the duties for which he was elected, four critical considerations must be made in judging his decision:

1. This is the opposite of what Van Hollen asserted during the campaign. When Van Hollen was defending the marriage amendment, he said it wouldn’t apply to domestic partnerships. In a press release from the 2006 campaign, Van Hollen wrote: “The Legislature or the governing body of a political subdivision or local governmental unit is not precluded from authorizing or requiring that a right or benefit traditionally associated with marriage be extended to two or more unmarried individuals; for example, family health insurance benefits, certain probate rights, or the ability to file joint tax returns.” He added, “But it’s also clear that if elected [my opponent] intends to interpret the laws as she sees fit instead of executing the role of attorney general.” Doesn’t Van Hollen’s legal flip flop compromise his and the Department of Justice’s credibility?

Former director of WISGOP Rick Wiley recently joined Mark Neumann's campaign for governor.

Kay Bailey Hutchison announced she's leaving the US Senate to run for governor of Texas against secessionist-GOPer incumbent Rick Perry.

Ah what a small world we live in.

See, Rick Wiley left his post with the Hutchison campaign to join Neumann's. Seems innocent enough right? Wiley said his doctor suggested a "less stressful environment" while he deals with some health issues -- and let me be the first to wish him a speedy recovery. But I had to wonder, what was so stressful about Texas?

Looks like there might be an answer.

Turns out the recently-launched Hutchison gubernatorial campaign website was loaded with thousands of hidden phrases and keywords designed to drive traffic to the campaign website from search engines. Now, using relevant key words hidden in your website's source code isn't illegal. The appropriate use of said keywords is an ongoing debate among web developers world wide. But that's not the issue here.

No, the issue here is the Hutchison campaign use of 'rick perry gay' as keywords. In fact, they used the phrase twice. Say what you want about the secession-minded governor -- but he's married to his high school sweetheart Anita, and, at least as far as I can gather, not gay.

That raises several questions: what was the Hutchison campaign trying to pull with the use of those phrases? Who green-lighted the use of the words on the site? How dirty is the Hutchison campagin planning on getting in Texas? And does the newly-transplanted Wiley plan on bringing those good ol' Texas values to the Wisconsin GOP primary?

Whether or not Wiley was behind 'Rick Perry Gay' we may never know. But just in case Wiley gets any ideas: Scott Walker is married to Tonnette. The only question one could raise there is whether or not she gets infections. Yet another mystery that remains yet unanswered.

UPDATE: Walker now says he's a member of a different church, although the one with the liberal pastor was listed in his 2005 campaign biography.

Remember last year when Sheldon Wasserman got called out by Alberta Darling for reneging on Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform "No New Taxes" pledge and everyone was like “Duh, Sheldon, you shouldn’t have signed that stupid P.O.S. pledge in the first place!”?

Thankfully some people, like Gov. Doyle, aren’t insane enough to put their signature next to anything masterminded by Mr. Norquist. Especially when that “thing” is designating Feb. 6 Ronald Reagan Day.

A story in the Capital Times today details the recent programming changes and the resulting listener uproar on the Mic, 92.1 FM, Madison’s only progressive talk station.

As 2008 ticked over into 2009, the Mic, rather quietly, announced that popular daytime show ‘The Thom Hartmann Program’ was going to be replaced by evangelical money-help host Dave Ramsey—the same Dave Ramsey who hosts a similar financial show on the Fox Business Channel. (I’ll leave my comments about having a right-wing, bible-thumping Fox mouthpiece on my progressive talk station for another post….)

However, the change won’t last. Ramsey is moving to the morning slot and Thom Hartmann is moving back to the 2-5p slot on the Mic.

As an avid Mic listener—the OWN office radio is tuned to the Mic at some point every day—I certainly welcome the change back to Hartmann. But the change and change back really drive home the danger of media consolidation that we’ve all grown accustomed to.

Unfortunately Wisconsin enshrined discrimination against gay families in its constitution in 2006. But that didn’t stop hundreds of Wisconsinites all across the state from protesting California’s passage of Proposition 8. Over the weekend people in Wisconsin stood in solidarity with others all across the country demanding equality for gay and lesbian families.

While reading the accounts of some of the protests over the weekend, I also came across a very telling piece in the Boston Globe today. Massachusetts is one of the only states in the nation that allows same-sex couples to get married. Although those that oppose equality claimed that the sky would fall and that the institution of marriage would collapse, the Globe piece reports that the very opposite is true.

Even though the State of Massachusetts is often maligned by conservatives for lacking “traditional” values, it has long ranked as having one of the lowest divorce rates in the country. Some 5 years after the state sanctioned gay marriage, it still has the lowest divorce rate in the nation. Not exactly the disaster for marriage that the extreme right chants about every time the subject is broached.

The Globe piece also shows that attitudes of people living in Massachusetts have drastically changed toward gay marriage as they have been exposed to it over the past five years. In 2004 only 42 percent of the people in Massachusetts approved of gay marriage, while today a full 59 percent approve.

Proposition 8 has rightly become a rallying cry for the advocates of full equality. While the fight against such discrimination continues, the State of Massachusetts should also be held up as an example. An example of equality actually enriching the institution of marriage, not tearing it apart. An example of how tolerance can overcome even the most deep seated fear.

Two weeks ago, Jesse Helms began what will hopefully be a long and unimpeded period of not existing.

Elizabeth Dole, who succeeded Helms after his welcomed retirement, ascended to his seat after a long career of executive appointments and wrecking Bob Dole's first marriage.

Yesterday in the Senate, she tried to name an AIDS/HIV prevention bill after Helms. Helms would be the same hate-filled, racist who, when trying to block funding for the Ryan White AIDS bill, blamed victims of the disease for their  "deliberate, disgusting and revolting conduct"

Mrs. Dole has some bad, bad karma coming her way for this repulsive pandering. Nothing as pathetic as, say, having to watch her husband shill erection pills on television, but something like that.