Lighten up, it's just fashion.

Until it's not.

And here's the "I love Hitler" video that just couldn't be brushed away as drunken smack-talking.

Highlights of the last 8 days of following the Wisconsin protests here on the Althouse blog.

The light, low-key demonstration on February 13th: "It was a beautiful, unseasonably warm Sunday, and our new governor has just dropped a shocking union-busting proposal that our newly Republican legislature is likely to step up and pass. This is the push-back from the unions?"

February 16, when the Madison schools first closed for the protest: "Okay, now, everybody go to the demonstration! The kids won't have school, but you can learn a lot of things outside of school. Some of these things are even taught by the teachers who are not there. For example, it's okay to call in sick when you're not actually sick, but you just have something that you think is really important."

A lady lets Meade know — via face — that he's an idiot not to understand the comparison between Scott Walker and Hitler.

Another lady holds up a Scott-Walker-is-Hitler sign and tells me fascism is coming to America.

On February 18th, I wonder what's really happening: "Why wouldn't the Republicans embrace a strategy hostile to the public employees? Why wouldn't they drive a wedge between the public employees and all the other citizens in the state?"

I talk to a man who likens Walker to Stalin and a young woman who likens Walker to the Wicked Witch of the West.

I don't like Jesse Jackson grandstanding here.

I'm wary of the Tea Party rally if it insufficiently Wisconsin.

I encounter the doctors who are handing out sick-day excuses to protesters.

Video: faces in the Tea Party crowd (with audio of Breitbart speaking).

I confront a woman with a "Please don't teabag our children" sign.

The Judas/Brett Favre/Scott Walker thing.

The nefarious honking salt trucks.

I'm irked at the lack of journalistic vigor from the New York Times.

Saturday night's all right for protesting...

... get a little activism in.

Enlarge to read more of the signs. Do you see the "Big Lebowski" reference? "Do you see what happens, Larry?" is a reference to — click for harsh language...



It's a violent reference. NSFW language after the jump:

"Do you see what happens, Larry? DO YOU SEE WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU FUCK A STRANGER IN THE ASS? [proceeds to smash up what he wrongly believes is Larry's new Corvette] THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS, LARRY! THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU FUCK A STRANGER IN THE ASS! DO YOU SEE WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU FUCK A STRANGER IN THE ASS? [proceeds to smash up what he wrongly believes is Larry's new Corvette] THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS, LARRY! THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU FUCK A STRANGER IN THE ASS!"

But, of course, the children don't understand what it means.

"Lazy Protesters Straight Ahead"...

... says the sign stuck in the snow.

Straight ahead, at the protest, protesters chide the lazy voters...



"This is what happens when nobody votes." Who's she calling nobody? Well, the good people didn't vote, and look what the hell happened:



"Adolf Walker/Union Buster."

One of the main chants in the Capitol is: "This is what democracy looks like." And I've been asking protesters: Don't you think what happened last October was democracy? [ADDED: I mean November!]

After all those efforts to paint Tea Partiers as using violent images and rhetoric, these pictures from Madison have got to hurt.

The Wisconsin GOP made a nice montage:



And here's a picture I took today:



I asked the woman if she thought Scott Walker was like Hitler, and she said "Yes." So I said, "Are you saying that you think fascism could come to America," and she said, "It's what's happening."

Scott Walker compared to Hitler.

At yesterday's demonstration against Scott Walker's budget plan, Meade took this video of a woman with a sign portraying the Governor with a Hitler mustache. Meade conducts a short interview, then catches a young man with a bullhorn explaining that we need to tax the rich.

"Jackie the Hitler Saluting Dog Really Pissed Off the Nazis."

"The documents reveal that three German ministries became involved in the investigation of a Finnish pharmaceutical magnate, Tor Borg, and his dog Jackie, over reports that the dog was trained to ... [respond] to the command 'Hitler' by raising its paw."

I can't find video of the dog, but here's Hitler's reaction:

Q: "What are the biggest geopolitical factors affecting mustaches right now?"

A:

There is still the perception that leaders cannot have mustaches, at least in the U.S. there are less than 30 members of Congress that wear mustaches, and unfortunately some of the people that have been deemed by Americans to be tyrants or evil, such as Saddam Hussein, have been heavily mustached. So I think that there is a perception still that Mustached Americans are incapable of leading, are incapable of being role models, are incapable of living a just life by certain sectors of our culture.

Oh, quit whining and shave. Hitler ruined the mustache for all time. We can't go back...

"We have ridiculed Hitler in a way that invites young people to create their own style and not to be influenced by their peers."

An ad agency tries to convey the fuzzy thinking about nonconformity behind this 18-foot-high poster:

"I'd love to enter politics. I will one day. I'd adore to be Prime Minister. And, yes, I believe very strongly in fascism."

"The only way we can speed up the sort of liberalism that's hanging foul in the air at the moment is to speed up the progress of a right-wing, totally dictatorial tyranny and get it over as fast as possible. People have always responded with greater efficiency under a regimental leadership. A liberal wastes time saying, 'Well, now, what ideas have you got?' Show them what to do, for God's sake. If you don't, nothing will get done. I can't stand people just hanging about. Television is the most fascist, too. Adolf Hitler was one of the first rock stars."

So said David Bowie in his 1976 interview (with Cameron Crowe) for Playboy.

Brandon Hardesty plays "Goodfellas" as Jimmy Stewart and Stephen Hawking.

It's #2 in a series that is up to #56. Why haven't I noticed this YouTube channel before? This adorable reenactment is quite brilliant (with the familiar "Goodfellas" language):



The video that got my attention is Hardesty's reenactment of the famous bunker scene from the movie "Downfall." This was embedded at BoingBoing a few days ago and linked in the NYT last night. There's that annoying German production company that got YouTube to take down all the "Downfall" parodies that used the original footage from their movie. I hope they don't come after this use of the script.

I'm not going to watch the other 54 videos all at once, but I'm going to get to all of them. I was going to watch the "Fight Club" one, but I see that it's the scene that reveals the key secret, and I can't play it while Meade is in the room. He's never watched "Fight Club," though we've started the DVD a couple times.

(How long is it supposed to take to get your new lover/spouse to get through all of the DVDs you deem essential? I don't think we're going to live that long.)

Photographs of a baby girl dressed up as Hitler, Idi Amin, Mussolini, Mao, Stalin, and Pinochet.

It's the work of Norwegian-Danish artist Nina Maria Kleivan:

Kleivan said she was inspired to begin sewing infant-sized costumes soon after the birth of her daughter, who is now 11 years old. She said complications from her pregnancy had left her and the baby sitting at home. Looking at her daughter, she recalled, she considered that each human life begins as a blank slate, with opportunity to do good or evil....

Her husband was supportive -- until he spotted a tiny swastika armband.

"'I'm aware that you're an artist, but this is wrong,' he told me," Kleivan recalled him saying. "I've pondered that a lot myself: Could I really do this? I agree it's on the verge, especially Hitler, whom I and most others view as the incarnation of evil. He and Stalin were the hardest to do. It hurt."

Yeah, Hitler. That's when you went to far. Or does the problem go back to that time when you were home, postpartum, and gazing at the infant set off ideation about evil.

The baby's name is Faustina — the feminine version of Faust (who sold his soul to the devil).

Rush Limbaugh keeps mocking Obama for being too much of a professor.

And I agree with a lot of this mockery. So don't get me wrong: I like Rush Limbaugh. I listen all the time. But that means I catch some things that you may not notice. And I caught a couple of ironies in yesterday's show.

First, he's twice played this clip from the Rodney Dangerfield movie "Back to School":



And yesterday he says that it shows "an economics course with an Obama type professor, an arrogant, conceited snob who has no understanding of what really happens in the business world... who thinks he has all the answers."

So Obama doesn't know what goes on in the real world, and the evidence of what goes on in the real world is... a Hollywood movie. Irony #1.

Later, after this putdown of professors, he's talking with a caller about the subject of "the Big Lie" (a concept from Hitler's "Mein Kampf"):

RUSH: Well, see that's the nature of the Big Lie. You tell something --

CALLER: You're right.

RUSH: -- so audacious that nobody could possibly think they'd make it up.

CALLER: No. No. Well, Hitler used to do that. Goebbels was great for that, just tell a bigger lie and bigger lie --

RUSH: Hitler didn't need Goebbels. Hitler was the architect of all this stuff. Goebbels, he just implemented it all. He didn't need Bormann. He might have needed Rommel --

CALLER: -- started it all (crosstalk)

RUSH: -- and he might have needed Christoph Waltz, and Hitler might have needed Bormann.

CALLER: Yeah, that's right.

RUSH: But Goebbels made movies out there....

Rush and the caller are suddenly acting like a couple of know-it-all history professors. What the hell does Rush know about who Hitler needed? Irony #2.

Hitler reacts to Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission.

UPDATE: The video is currently unavailable. It was funny while it lasted.

We were the ones we'd been waiting for.

(Via Instapundit.)

"Doesn't the perception of Hitler as an artist make him seem less evil?"

"No. In fact, his love of art led directly into the heart of evil. But neither is it the root of everything else."

"Everyone seems to ignore that Pelosi started this, saying town hall participants were showing up with swastikas, etc."

"That's calling them Nazis, as Dick Durbin referred to our Gitmo interrogators from the Senate floor. I've been listening to the left compare George W. Bush to Hitler for eight years. I've been listening to Democrats and the left compare conservatism to Nazis my whole career. This time I responded. In kind, by comparing the radical left policies of the Nazis to today's radical left leadership of the Democrat Party. I'm not surprised they don't like it."

"[Roseanne Barr] nails the Fuehrer’s facial expressions with twisted glee..."

"... and as she takes the burnt gingerbread 'Jew Cookies' out of the oven ...."

"It’s as if it doesn't matter if you’re Hitler or anyone."

The protest against Condoleezza Rice's return to Stanford University.