That conversation at Meadhouse at 5:22 a.m.

I'm downstairs about to make my second cup of coffee, and this text is the first sign that Meade is awake:

Here's the article he was texting me about: "After failed search for police monitor, Madison oversight board opts for recruiting help" (Wisconsin State Journal). 

The search for someone to fill this newly created position was deemed to have failed "after the person recruited and selected by the board, with help from the city’s Human Resources Department, took himself out of the running amid revelations that he’d discriminated against a woman he’d been having an affair with and violated state licensing requirements at a company he ran more than 15 years ago." 

We're told the position will pay $125,000. I can't picture it ever being properly filled, yet apparently now we're going to pay people to try to fill it, because God knows, they can't back down.

ADDED: More about Eric A. Hill's lawsuit here. 

[H]e began looking at the public social media pages of members of Madison’s Police Civilian Oversight Board [and found]... “29 separate instances of biased, defamatory statements — occasionally containing obscene language — impugning my race, gender and former profession, among the social media accounts of seven out of the 11 voting members in charge of hiring for this position,” he says....

“As a white, male, former military policeman, I found their brazenly racist, sexist and anti-military posts not only personally demeaning, but professionally deleterious to my status as a candidate for this position, as I was additionally required — and not permitted to decline — to self-identify my race and gender to the city of Madison in its initial application form,” Hill said in a statement....

"Respect/Empower/Include."

Murals on the boarded up windows of State Street, photographed today, in Madison, Wisconsin.

Madisonians in shorts trudge past a mural of Barack and Michelle Obama that is painted on the boarded-up window of Which Wich Superior Sandwiches:



On the boarded-up window of the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, a drooling troglodyte cop observes what might be a pile of burning doughnuts that give off smoke that reads — like a thought balloon — "Defund the Police":



A longer view of the side of the museum featuring an ironic "Right turn only" sign:



There's the notion that "being a revolutionary" has an element of being fun, loving, and beautiful:



There's the grievance that you can't play your music really loud without people calling the cops:



More Madisonians trudging along, this time past dripping letters that few will read, but I'm seeing "Tell the President/To prepare the bunker/When he flee/Because until we see/Justice you will/Never see peace!"



"Yes, we can!" the old President says, as a waiter sets up an outdoor café table.

"Day 10 of protests ends with 'defund police' painted on road leading to [the Wisconsin] Capitol."

The Wisconsin State Journal reports.

Protesters painted "defund police" in giant letters on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard Monday night. The street leads from the state Capitol to Monona Terrace, passing between the Madison Municipal Building and City-County Building, at top.

We're told this was "without city permission," but I think that has to be read to mean without explicit city permission. Something that conspicuous — taking that much effort, in that location — is actively condoned. It had the tacit permission of the city.

Also at the link are other photos of the 10th day of protests. Based on the photographs, I would say that the protesters are overwhelmingly white and overwhelmingly female.

If I were still the sort of person who roams around inside protests and talks to people, I would ask them how they would harmonize the #MeToo movement with defunding the police. A year ago, there was so much of a push to get men arrested for things that used to be ignored. Then, the slogan was "Time's up." We were never going back. Is time up on Time's Up?

I remember when it was a big feminist goal to force the police to take domestic violence so seriously that they were required to arrest someone when they answered a call. It became the statutory law here in Wisconsin. I'd like to ask the female protesters whether they ever supported that law and if they did whether they will now declare it to have been a mistake — a racist mistake.

ADDED: In "If they can, why can’t we?," David Blaska muses about painting over the "u" in "DEFUND THE POLICE." Changing the "U" to an "E" would flip the message: "Call it a little editing. Call it vandalizing the vandalism. Call it free speech. Call it civil disobedience. Call it a profile in courage or social suicide in the super-heated atmosphere of progressive Madison. Call a lawyer."

"We the People of the United States have hope for the future..."

Photographed yesterday on State Street in Madison.

"Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway came up with the idea for the murals and tasked city arts administrator Karin Wolf with the job."

"Wolf says she reached out to community cultural partners the city already has a relationship with in order to tap local artists. 'We definitely wanted to amplify the voices of people who have been directly impacted by racial injustice,' she says.... Not all the murals are part of the city program, says Wolf. Some store owners arranged for their own art and others artists went rogue. 'People didn’t know better,' says Wolf. 'A lot of people wanted to help and didn’t know how.'" — Isthmus reports on the murals of State Street.

There was a noticeable change from the condition of the plywood 4 days ago, the last time I'd checked. There's an effort to replace harsh graffiti with real murals and, as you can tell from the quote above, a prioritizing of black artists — with spaces marked as "reserved" and this message to white artists that "giving up some white privilege means saving this space for artists of color"...



A space that looked like this 4 days ago...



Is now painted over in yellow and marked "Reserved for a black female artist/Please respect this space":



I think some white artists were painting flowers rather than a "Black Lives Matter" image, and this looks as though someone who'd chalked out her design thought better of it, quit in the middle of things, and requested that a black artist "claim this space":



At the art museum, they were painting out the graffiti, presumably prepping for a nicer mural...




Some of more on-topic images were colorful and optimistic, like this...



And this...



Others had a harder edge, but were, I would say, respectful toward the city:



I wasn't sure which of the art was part of the city's program. This has more of a graffiti quality but it's also pretty positive...



This, I think, is the kind of thing the city is trying get painted over...

I went back to State Street this morning and saw how the murals have changed...