Have you heard this one, about the prosecutor in Indiana who wrote an email to Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker during the protests suggesting that Walker arrange a fake attack on himself and blame it on the unions? He resigned. From Wisconsinwatch.org, linked to above:

Carlos F. Lam submitted his resignation shortly before the Center published a story quoting his Feb. 19 email, which praised Walker for standing up to unions but went on to say that the chaos in Wisconsin presented "a good opportunity for what's called a 'false flag' operation." "If you could employ an associate who pretends to be sympathetic to the unions' cause to physically attack you (or even use a firearm against you), you could discredit the unions," the email said. "Currently, the media is painting the union protest as a democratic uprising and failing to mention the role of the DNC and umbrella union organizations in the protest. Employing a false flag operation would assist in undercutting any support that the media may be creating in favor of the unions. God bless, Carlos F. Lam." At 5 a.m. Thursday, expecting the story to come out that day, Lam called his boss, Johnson County, Ind., Prosecutor Brad Cooper, and told him he had been up all night thinking about it. "He wanted to come clean, I guess, and said he is the one who sent that email," Cooper said.

This sort of thing has a long history in America. On a reporting trip to Chicago many years back, I was told that locally, this practice even had a name. To set up a fake attack on oneself was to pull a Pooch, so called after an alderman, Roman Pucinski, who was alleged to have been the master of the genre, hiring marksmen to drive by his campaign office and spray some bullets in the windows at nighttime, the better to impress upon his constituents what a noble and courageous battle he was waging on their behalf.

In New York City in 1969, Mario Procaccino was the white-backlash candidate for mayor, and Herman Badillo the first Puerto Rican with a serious shot at winning the mayoralty (some of you may know that Herman is still on the scene, and fairly conservative these days). I was once told that the Procaccino campaign hired flatbed truckloads of blacks and Puerto Ricans to go around white ethnic areas of the city pounding on various percussive instruments and shouting things like "Vote Badillo, it's our time!", which served as a more graphic warning to those voters of what was at stake than anything Procaccino could say himself.

This is the second Indiana law enforcement official to have to resign because of outre emails sent to Walker. The other guy, actually a deputy attorney general, suggested the use of live ammunition against protesters. What is the Indiana-Wisconsin right-wing connection here, can any of you shed any light on this? It's bizarre and appalling.

At the same time, this talk of Chicago and New York machine politics does make me a bit wistful. I didn't have time to make a quiz today, but here's a little bonus question for you. Who was the Chicago mayor who died in Miami in 1933 taking a bullet that was apparently intended for Franklin Roosevelt, with whom he was appearing at that moment? The mayor's last words were allegedly: "I'm glad it was me instead of you."

