Saturday, September 21, 2013

Team Walker Terrified By School Children

Ryan Ekvall
Kati Walsh is an art teacher in the Madison area.  Like many Wisconsinites, she wasn't particularly active in politics or in her union until two and a half years ago, when Scott Walker and his Teapublican allies announced their full scale war on the working class by trying to bust the unions.  Since Walker dropped "the bomb," Kati has become much more active and has been very involved with her union, helped with the recall and recently graduated from the training program offered by Emerge Wisconsin.

The fact that she is intelligent, motivated and - gasp - a woman, this makes her an immediate threat in the eyes of Team Walker.

So enter professional propagandist, Ryan Ekvall of Wisconsin Reporter.  Ekvall is the latest of a number of the usual trolls being cycled through the Koch front group, apparently replacing Kevin Binversie who left under unexplained circumstances.

Ekvall went trolling through Walsh's social media until he found something that he could conflate.  What he found was a blog post by Walsh in which she described a lesson she gave her students about the art of political cartoons.

Because the children chose to draw their cartoons about Scott Walker, Ekvall decided that he not only had to try to discredit Walsh but showed his true nature when he attacked the children as well:
Some kindergartners, first-graders and second-graders in Madison public schools are apparently preparing for futures in either political cartooning or time on a psychiatrist’s couch.

Kati Walsh, an elementary art teacher at the Madison Metropolitan School District in July posted some of her students’ drawings of Gov. Scott Walker in jail. Walsh suggests her young Rembrandts’ ideas for their sketches popped up out of thin air.
So, in Ekvall's warped mind, one lesson means a career or mental health issues?

I suppose we shouldn't expect much from Ekvall who actually tweeted that milk is bad for cows:


Ekvall is a good fit for Wisconsin Reporter though.  Wisconsin Reporter has a long history of being less than accurate with their sensationalism and distortion.  You could find more reliable reporting in the tabloids at the checkout lane in a grocery store.

They ran one of their "legitimate" news stories based on a hearsay story told on a squawk radio show.

At the beginning of 2012, I exposed Wisconsin Reporter to be nothing more than a front group for the Franklin Center, which in turn is nothing but a front group for the Koch Brothers and similar oligarch groups.   I further pointed out that this group was being operated by Walker financial donors and consultants to Walker's campaign.

This was followed up by an independent investigation by Erik Gunn, who also found them to be rather sketchy at times.   Gunn found that the facts which I reported were accurate.

Even though this propagandist group has no integrity and no reliability, their pretense of being an actual news agency is enough for other Koch-like-funded groups to produce misleading stories which could be used on campaign advertisements.

Ekvall's story against Ms. Walsh and her students should be taken in the light of who they really are.  What this story really conveys is what I'm pretty sure they didn't mean to convey - that Walker is so vulnerable in the upcoming election that they are willing to attack and smear innocent teachers and their students, in a feeble and vain effort to drum up support for Walker.

7 comments:

  1. If the Dems in Wisconsin had som stones, they'd ask Walker if smearing elementary school art teachers was OK. And do that for every smear job on everyday workers done by GOP propaganda outlets like Wisc. "Reporter", Media TraKKKers, and WGOP radio stations.

    We should play divide and conquer as well...

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  2. Kevin just doesn't last more than a couple years anywhere!
    Crept for kohler company where he made it 3 years before he was swept up in a computer usage crackdown!
    No wonder he can't keep his linked in or even his own blog updated on his employment.
    Think he still wants to play lawyer someday?

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  3. The story was on Madison TV last night - WKOW, I think. I'm surprised it hasn't been picked up more widely. EG, Nothing in the Milw Journal, so far as I know or have seen.

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  4. Jake, that's not divide-and-conquer. That's merely reacting to everything your opponents do. It's a great way to be perpetually distracted. It's a great way to avoid having your own plan and strategy. In that sense, the GOP advances if Dems are doing nothing but reacting to what they do.

    And Capper, I'm disappointed you didn't repeat my tweet: "I look forward to the crowd-sourced Wis Reporter online database of elementary school artists and their drawings."

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    1. John- you can multi-task if you're the DPW. In addition to showing the better way forward, you should be forcing the WisGOP machine to respond to the disgusting behavior of their propaganda outlets.

      Because not responding to the propaganda allows the lies to ferment, because WisGOP has 18 hours a weekday to put out BS like this as "fact."

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  5. It appears her supposedly politically activist students don't stop with jailing and torturing Scott Walker. Apparently they are Anti-war, pro-obamacare, 99%ers, gun control advocates, anti voter ID and more. It appears she has been indoctrinating her students for well over a year based on the date stamps on these photos of artwork she tweeted. http://twitpic.com/photos/WIartteacher?page=1

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    1. jifonz - Ummm...You DO realize MMSD is in the most Democratic area of the state? The kids PARENTS then would be largely Democratic. It's not a wonder the political cartoons came out anti-Walker. Doubt she had to do any persuading at all. Little pitchers have big ears and those little acorns don't fall far from their respective trees.

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