Uppity Wisconsin

Strategic Vision, the controversial (some say phony) polling firm that perhaps should have called itself Virtual Reality, has been a major factor in Wisconsin media's political coverage.

As we noted earlier, the media, particularly the Journal Sentinel, were all too happy to report the results released by Strategic Vision, which always claimed it had no clients paying for the polling and was somehow doing all kinds of expensive polling as a public service.

Reporters never asked to see the cross tabulations -- the breakdown of underlying responses that produce the bottom line numbers.

Remember the 2006 stories about how Tommy Thompson would beat the pants off Jim Doyle if Tommy decided to run for governor again? Here's the JS report, by Patrick Marley and Steve Walters, to refresh your memory:

Madison — Former Republican Gov. Tommy G. Thompson would trounce Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle by a nearly 2-to-1 margin if he jumped into the race, according to a poll released Wednesday.

In recent weeks, Thompson has called former aides and other Wisconsin political power brokers, soliciting advice as he considers taking on Doyle or U.S. Sen.

Hitting back hard at John McCain's last-minute smears and lies, Barack Obama's campaign is releasing a documentary detailing John McCain's involvement in the Keating Five scandal.

From the AP: "Rep. Rahm Emanuel, a Chicago Democrat and Obama supporter, warned against McCain's strategy. 'If we are going to go down this road, you know, Barack Obama was eight years old, somehow responsible for Bill Ayers,' he said. 'At 58, John McCain was associating with Charles Keating.'"

Emanuel is known as Rahmbo for his aggressive style that vis a vis Karl Rove uses facts against his political enemies.

These guys fight back. To paraphrase Sidney Blumenthal: Barack is from the toughest neighborhood in New York: Chicago.

I don't know how many people marched in Milwaukee on Thursday for fair treatment of immigrants.

No one has tried to put a number on it. Crowd estimates have gone out of fashion.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel is content to say that "thousands" marched, and made a point of saying it wasn't as many as last year. (How do we know that?)

Meanwhile, the New York Times was pointing to Milwaukee as one of the places where crowds didn't decrease, and made it sound like the biggest march in the country took place here.

One thing is certain: TENS of thousands of people marched in Milwaukee. I can't say whether it was 20,000 or 30,000 or more, but it was undoubtedly the biggest march Milwaukee will see in 2008 -- and the biggest since last year's march organized by the same people.

Consider this: The march started at 5th and Washington about 11:45 and wound its way across the 6th Street viaduct and down Wisconsin Avenue to Veterans Park. That's a good two and one-half miles, maybe a little more.

When the first marchers got to the park, many marchers were still lined up and waiting to leave the starting point. Marchers were strung out all along the 2.5-mile route, and kept coming into Veterans Park until about 2 p.m., more than two hours after the march began.