>>far less dangerous than the manure used by the organic brigade)
Your brain must be addled by all the pesticides you consume - or else by the GM crops your government refuses to label. Since when has horse manure caused birth defects?
You are full of horse manure, and quite obviously on the payroll of Monsanto. No sane, educated person holds the irrational views that you do.
The author and the commenters have their facts a little garbled. The "Parker mansion" is the one that was owned by the wife of the founder of the company. Today it is owned by Tobin Ryan. It's located on Milwaukee Street. Paul Ryan's house (not mansion) was owned by George S. Parker II, the grandson of the founder of the company. It's located on St. Lawrence Ave. Neither house is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Paul Ryan's house is part of the Courthouse Hill Historic District, but is not individually listed on the Register. There are a number of houses in Janesville listed on the National Register; Paul Ryan's is not one of them.
BTW, being on the National Register doesn't mean that a house is palatial, just that it's old. I used to live in a house that was in a district (the Benton Avenue Historic District in Janesville) on the National Register. It was a two-bedroom bungalow.
As to the implication that "formerly vibrant downtown of Janesville is a hollowed-out shell of its old self," only a myopic or half-blind observer would make that ridiculous comment. Downtown Janesville began to decline as a retail district in the mid-1970s when a new mall was constructed on the east side of town. The area around the mall then developed into what is now a vibrant 6-mile stretch of retail and commercial enterprises. The retail and commercial area of Janesville moved; it didn't die, and it certainly wasn't a result of the closing of the GM plant. You're supposed to be reporting on "spin and disinformation;" instead you're creating it.
I think this is just another of the ultra-right-wing Koch brother’s methods to divide and conquer the public and keep us from paying attention to what they and their ilk are doing. I know it sounds way out there, but that's the way they work.
On a progressive web site, my husband and I signed a petition requesting that companies not support or sell Koch products. We think it was your website, but it also could have been several other progressive sites. Shortly after that, we started getting emails from what appeared to be Koch companies with emails that showed all our personal information. Apparently it was meant to intimidate us. We also at that time started to get calls from a certain 800 number. I picked it up and there was silence. I told them to speak up or I would hang up. They didn't, so I hung up. I put the call on block, but the bastards are still able to get through and ring. They never leave a message.
It appears that Bros. KKK may have hired (hacker) guns who are getting and spreading misinformation all over the place to spoof companies, and I believe phone numbers as well, to convince people to think that good companies are hassling people and just in general making a mess of everything. This is what they do. They can't win fairly so they mess everything up for all of us. While everyone is running around in circles, they are busy buying everything and everyone who will sell his/her soul to their agenda. Money buys a lot of politicians and agencies.
We just wanted to let you know.
Thanks to the extraordinary efforts of the CMD, reporter Beau Hodai and others such as Lee Fang, there is some counterpoint to the din coming from the right wing noise machine.
Obviously, if Edelman was able to connect to a group of propagandists with such facility, the reactionary echo chamber is far less spontaneous, more organized, than the public would even begin realize.
The comparison to the despicable work of Hitler's Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, is indeed chilling, with the billionaire industrialist Kochs today reprising the role of I.G. Farben, Krupp Steel, Siemens, and Rupert Murdoch's empire acting as a contemporary voice for the right wing of the Republican party much as Nazi newspapers, The Attack and the People's Observer served that cause for the genocidal eugenicists.
I'd recommend that readers go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Goebbels and come to their own conclusions.
Lastly, ALEC overwhelmingly is a Republican, corporatist organization.
The few Democratic members it has enlisted are an expression of tokenism. Indeed, a fair percentage of them have changed parties including the likes of for-profit prison supporters Kansas state senator Chris Steineger and Louisiana Senator Noble Ellington. ALEC boasts that two of its five most recent chairs have been Democrats. This is a tokenism that mirrors the presence of minorities who are prominent in Republican National Conventions. One wag noted that there were more African-American speakers at the RNC convention in NYC in 2004 than there were accredited as delegates.
Ellington and fellow turncoat John R. Smith were the top two Louisiana legislative recipients of Koch Industries and subsidiaries cash over the last decade. http://www.followthemoney.org
ALEC honored lame duck Noble as its outgoing national chair and former Louisiana state chair at its November 2011 conference in Scottsdale. It paid $2,150 to bring him and his current wife along.
http://thepoliticaldesk.com/?p=1281
At that meeting, Beau Hodai was evicted in the middle of the night at the behest of ALEC by Westin hotel security and off-duty Phoenix police for being what the Free Beacon termed a "threat" to ALEC.
Pages