Hi everybody reading out there! Sorry for the preemptive morning blog today - normally I would ask before leap-frogging the normal order here and even when I do that I get a nasty case of writers' block and don't usually follow through. However in this case I just read something that made my blood boil and I feel compelled to fore-go part of my sleep cycle to write about it.

And of course, what would be a better setting for political shenanigans these days than Wisconsin.

As you may know, the recall effort against Gov. Scott Walker is steaming hotly despite the cold midwestern winter. An excellent article published Tuesday by the Christian Science Monitor provides some insight into the state GOP's tactics to fight the recall - by discrediting the petitions being circulated by Wisconsin's residents and suing the state Government Accountability Board claiming that they're not "verifying" the signatures on those petitions. Meanwhile, their corporate purse-holders are working the other side of the coin:



So let me get this straight.. they are protesting the recall effort by not only deliberately signing the petitions with a fake name, but also the name of the most notorious dictator of the last century?

If I may, I've got a quick bit of advice for the folks at "Mines for Wisconsin". I've been an active participant in several protests in my life, and in a couple instances I've started them. From this I've learned many important lessons - one of them being in order for a protest to be successful, it needs a clear message or statement that the public masses can understand easily. In fact, that was a major criticism that many of us had about the Occupy movement in general.

So I ask all of you reading this today to think to yourselves - what kind of statement is made when a protest encourages people to deliberately and fraudulently sign the name "Adolf Hitler" to a public recall election petition? Think hard let that burn an image in your mind for a moment. Then turn that mental image into action by lending a hand with the recall effort or by sending a few bucks to the folks at United Wisconsin who are working tirelessly to fight back against those who would invoke such imagery in their quest to consolidate power away from the citizens and into the hands of the billionaire Koch brothers.

This concludes our mental exercise for today. Please, join me in the comments below for some coffee, frivolity and further discussion of the day's events.