Dave Weigel at Slate on Walker’s latest burst of grandious entitlement:
The two week sleep-in at the Wisconsin state capitol is over; protesters will no longer crash in the building. The decision comes after a court battle (a polite, short one) over whether it was legal for the state to limit access to the building, and the state’s case was that protesters were doing damage.
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[S]tate officials said that damage from the demonstration to the marble inside and outside the Capitol would cost an estimated $7.5 million: $6 million for damage inside, $1 million for damage outside and $500,000 for additional expenses.…
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I’ve got my own call in on this. There’s no precedent for the occupation of the Capitol, nothing to compare this number to, but protesters were very conscious to limit damage to the building…
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The only times I looked at the Capitol and said “wow, this is going to need cleaning” were when I saw carpet in the rooms being used for strategy and protest-staging, like the third floor room occupied by teaching assistants. There wasn’t filth; there was just some of the liquid spatter and food crumbs you’d expect after two weeks of people living in these rooms. But will it cost $6 million to scrub the building’s carpets and floors? It’s worth checking back in a few months to see if this $7.5 million estimate actually panned out; also worth checking how much it usually costs to clean the building.
Maybe the Koch brothers had Blackwater Xe put in a no-bid contract for hand-scrubbing the floors with Fiji water…