Kaia Fowler sings her protest song "We'll See It Through" with slide show of (mostly) my images

Bad news falls like hail,
We can still prevail.
See it through, see it through --
I'll look to you,
You look to me,
And together we'll see it through.
Kaia Fowler, "See It Through"

I love those lines. Bad news did fall like hail when the Supreme Court election turned into a storm of contention in Waukesha the other day. But together, we can still prevail. We'll see it through.

I've been thinking of editing some of my protest photos into a slideshow with music, but that probably wasn't going to happen very soon. I'm a poky video editor. Too many decisions, and I tend to obsess too much about things. And what to do about the music?

So when Whitewater singer/songwriter Kaia Fowler asked a few weeks ago if she could use some of my photos for a YouTube slideshow video of her protest song, "We'll See It Through," it didn't take me long to say, "Yes." She sent me the song, I liked it, and it seemed like a great way to have someone else edit my photos into a video.

It's a strange feeling seeing your own photos (all the photos in the video except the few indicated in the credits at the end) set to music, edited by someone else's hand, and accompanying accompanying another person's creative vision. Sort of like having your familiar memories turned into an unfamiliar dream. I liked it. Thanks Kaia!

There's another video on YouTube of Kaia singing the song without the slideshow here.

"We Shall Not Be Moved"

The Raging Grannies performed "We Shall Not Be Moved" -- with lyric updates by Lou and Peter Berryman -- and other songs at the Saturday rally at the Capitol. More about Madison's Raging Grannies, who are part of an international movement started in Canada in the eighties.

There's what we know Kathy did, and then there's what she may have done we don't know about

Some 14,000 votes went unreported Tuesday night in a hot election – the latest battleground for Republicans vs. labor unions. Democrats cry foul as the seat tilts toward the incumbent, a conservative. Experts, though, say such errors are common. -- Christian Science Monitor

Don't you love the way mainstream media do their best to reassure readers that everything's OK in the wake of something like the Waukesha County vote scandal? As if to say, hey, no big whoop -- happens all the time. Even Nate Silver did essentially the same thing in his respected Five Thirty Eight election blog in the NYT, supporting his conclusion "Vote-Counting Error In Wisconsin Points to Incompetence, Not Conspiracy with a nice collection of graphs and charts that show the revised results were more in keeping with the usual voting patterns than the returns reported by Kathy Nickolaus on election night. Naturally.

It's true that election officials make mistakes all the time. They misplace votes and transpose numbers and do all sorts of things people do when they're tired and stressed. Usually the errors average out, and in any case, the margin of victory usually dwarfs this irreducible margin of error. It's true that canvassing the vote changed reported totals all over Wisconsin, a bit here, and a bit there.

And then we had Kathy Nickolaus. Again, it's possible to somehow forget to count the votes from Waukesha County's second-largest city and thus misplace 14,000 votes. Maybe it even happened with her computer the way she said, even though numerous IT people have said her story makes no sense. Strange things happen all the time.

What all these comforting "relax, there's no fraud, just incompetence" narratives have in common is that they ignore the strange peculiarities of this case -- things so weird that they would be edited out of a work of fiction as implausible. To begin with, Kathy Nicklaus, the County Clerk who found 7,500 additional votes for David Prosser just when he needed them, used to report to Prosser when she worked in computer support for the Assembly Republican Caucus. She was known as highly partisan and worked there during the period of the biggest scandal the Statehouse had seen in decades, the caucus scandal that saw leaders in both parties indicted for using state employees to do political work (a practice Justice Prosser tried to justify during his testimony in Scott Jensen's trial). Kathy Nicklaus was apparently close enough to the action that she had to be offered immunity to get her testimony.

She went straight from that job in 2002 to election as County Clerk of Waukesha County. Some wondered how being an immunized witness in a huge scandal qualified her for an important position of public trust, but the voters elected her anyhow. (That's Waukesha County for you -- hard to imagine that happening anywhere else.) In her current job she has been secretive, asked by an audit to clean up her security procedures, and kept voting data on a personal computer that only she had a password for, violating the most basic principle of preventing election fraud. This is not her first snafu changing the outcome of an election. So there are some things that need to be looked at before we automatically conclude that Nickolaus's actions were the same kind of inevitable "human error" that are a part of any vote count.

There needs to be an investigation by the US. Attorney, because there just isn't anyone in state government nonpartisan enough to investigate this matter in a manner that will satisfy the public. What we know of Nickolaus's actions can presumably be dealt with by the recount, but her pattern of behavior is so strange that we also need to find out what she may have done that we don't know about. Nickolaus's computer and records need to be impounded. Voting machines should also be looked at. They can be hacked and have been hacked in other places. After this strange tangle of events, we need to make sure that didn't happen here.

We need to reestablish the faith in our voting process that has been badly shattered. To some extent, that's always the result of an election this close -- with every vote counting for so much, it's easy to lose sight of the line where human error ends and fraud begins. It's also the result of the peculiar circumstances in this case, the partisan background of the person who dealt with the votes in question, and her one-time relationship with the man who benefited from them. The Justice Department needs to step in to restore confidence in the system. If we can't rely on a base of integrity in our electoral system, what can we rely on?

Jesse Jackson speaking at MLK Jr memorial and get out the vote rally on election eve at the Capitol

I wasn't very close and couldn't get much of a photo because of the trees in the way, so more than anything, this is simply a personal memento of a very moving moment -- one that I won't forget for a long time.

April 4, 1968 was a terrible day. I can't presume to speak for the pain felt by black Americans that awful day, but even most white Americans were profoundly shocked and their world grew darker that day. I've never really gotten over the shock. The assassination of President Kennedy was traumatic, but he was a president, and unfortunately American presidents had already been the targets of violence many times. But Martin Luther King, Jr. was a man of peace and an advocate on nonviolence. When he was cut down, a light went out of the world, and we've been dealing with the darkness ever since.

I found it deeply moving that the man who was at Dr. King's side that day chose to spend the anniversary here in Madison, speaking eloquently to us of martyrdom and rebirth. And it does feel that something new is being born here in Madison.

My lucky Solidarity Tee does its job and comes through for JoAnne Kloppenburg

When I went to bed last night I kept on the lucky Solidarity Tee that helped her close the gap. She still was behind by 576, as I recall. By the time I checked my computer this morning she was up by a couple hundred, only awaiting the "Late Mills" tally. When the count came in, Prosser only picked up 2 additional votes, and her lead held up.

What an amazing tribute to all the people who fought so hard and turned out at the polls. When will it sink in on the Republicans how much Fitzwalker really cost them? With control of both houses of legislature, and conservative Supreme Court for good measure, Wisconsin was theirs to redistrict. Now we're three recalls away from redistricting going to liberal Supreme Court. Kiss Wisconsin goodbye in 2012, Republicans!

The recount is bound to be contentious, but our "Katherine Harris" is Democratic Secretary of State Doug La Follette. And since Wisconsin has relatively clean election -- Republican spin to the contrary -- election results tend to hold up in recounts.

I'll be wearing my Solidarity Tee as needed, just to make sure.

Does this look like a person to you? Me neither. Local voters agree, pass referendums by huge margins.

According to the U.S. Supreme Court in Citizens United, corporations are "persons" with free speech rights that can't be regulated -- not only that, but "persons" on steroids, since there are restrictions on political giving by real, live people. We saw how that worked last fall, when a flood of corporate money -- including lots of money from the Koch brothers, both directly and indiretly through "third party" advertising -- helped turn the tide for Scott Walker and Ron Johnson.

Does the Constitution need to be amended to overturn the Supreme Court decision? Yesterday that question was put to voters in two local referendums.

Voters in the city of Madison and Dane County are among those who saw a referendum question asking whether they support amending the U.S. Constitution. The question asked voters whether they support amending the U.S. Constitution to no longer recognize corporate political spending as free speech. The wording varies on the ballots, with different language crafted by the Common Council and county board. The referendum isn't binding.

In the city of Madison, voters supported the referendum with 84 percent voting yes. In Dane County, voters also voted yes on the referendum, with 132,236 votes in support and 37,893 against it.

The local referendums were part of a national effort, Move to Amend, that seeks to overturn the legal doctrine that corporations are "persons." Looks like we're off to a good start.

My favorite of the films we saw at the Wisconsin Film Festival was "Bill Cunningham New York"

"Bill Cunningham New York" was my personal favorite of the films T and I saw at the Wisconsin Film Festival.

I gave it a "5" on my tear-out Audience Award Ballot. Enjoyed it on so many levels. Among other things, watching the 80-plus-year-old Cunningham tool around the streets of New York on his Schwinn is a great reminder that you're only as old as you think you are.

Cunningham is the last staff photographer at the New York Times to shoot film, and since he was well into his seventies when newspapers started converting to digital, he would seem to be entitled.

To watch him dance around his subjects with his Nikon FM2 is a lesson in why some people still prefer mechanical film cameras to digital. The FM2 is no longer made, but it was a relatively inexpensive Nikon that took the full range of Nikon lenses. Most pros used the much more expensive F series, but a few used the FM2 as a second body, as it was small and tough and durable and would still work if the battery for the meter died. For Cunningham, it was all he ever needed or wanted after stepping up from the Olympus Pen F half-frame with which he started taking photos of street fashion.

Still going strong in his eighties, and still using a bicycle to get around the city, Cunningham is a joy to watch working because of his obvious delight in what he does and the deftness with which he captures his vision. The camera supports his working style perfectly. There is no digital lag. There's also no lag for metering and focusing. He's shown shooting with what looks like a 35mm medium wide angle lens that he has prefocused. All he has to do is bring the camera to his eye and instantly click the shutter. It's real "decisive moment" street shooting.

At night, at the charity events and society galas he also photographs for the Times, his working method is equally simple and effective. He doesn't bother with high ISO film, wide open aperture shooting with all the depth of field issues that creates. He simply stops down to a medium aperture and shoots with a small, handheld off-camera flash.

He's insistent on getting his vision into print exactly the way he sees it. It's fun watching him bully his art director into laying out his photos on the computer exactly the way he wants them. The rest of the time, whether on the streets of New York or documentating the rich and famous, he has a disarming personal modesty. When he calls the film lab, this man whose photos are awaited eagerly each week by thousands of people around the world says, "I'm the guy who comes on a bike. You're developing some film for me..."

"Bill Cunningham New York" just went into limited theatrical release, so maybe it will come back to Madison. If not, you should be able to see it soon in video or on Netflix. It's treat for anyone interested in graceful aging, fashion, street photography, the New York Times, photography and/or all of the above. And to give it added timeliness, there's that funny business about David Koch.

I'm with the Zombies: We cannot rest in peace as long as Scott walks all over Wisconsin

I loved the Zombie Walk Against Walker in Madison Saturday. It was truly poignant to see all these tormented souls in their desperate search for brains in a state whose Republican leadership seems to have none.

We're coming up on one big election Tuesday. If you haven't voted absentee already, be sure to make it to the polls Tuesday. The choice is clear. As the Zombie on the right points out, there are two possible courses of action. You can come alive April 5 and vote for Kloppenburg. Or you can vote Republican (a vote for Prosser is a vote for Walker in this nonpartisan election) because personal responsibility is for other people.

Want to see more Zombies? Check out my Flickr set.