Jack: Leave it to college students to believe they were the ones clever enough to come up with the “die-in” concept. A few weeks ago, I dug up this article, which details a “death march” put on by local Wisconsin teachers in April 1974. Clearly, there have been no upgrades in protesting technology in 37 years. But that’s the reason these kids are in college — to learn that everything they think is clever and unique has been done before. (In college, I thought I invented the “send your phone bill to the cable company and your cable bill to the phone company” trick to buy yourself an extra month to pay them — turns out my uncles did the same thing in the ’70s.)

And yes, disrupting the Special Olympics ceremony was beyond the pale. In the past week, we’ve seen a political figure on the national stage demonstrate a complete lack of shame — and these Wisconsin protesters are evidently capable of Weiner-like levels of despicability.

It’s not even clear the protesters know what they’re protesting against. Scott Walker’s budget cuts the University of Wisconsin system by $250 million, but grants UW campuses much of the flexibility they have requested to deal with the funding reduction. (Virginia did much the same thing in 2005 under Democratic governor Mark Warner.) In 2003, Democratic governor Jim Doyle cut the UW by $250 million without offering any of the flexibility concessions Walker has — and yet the Capitol remained conspicuously zombie-free.

The protester of the week in Wisconsin, however, has to be Christopher Branski, who has been sending reams of vile, profane e-mails to state government officials. This letter, sent to Department of Administration secretary Mike Huebsch, makes Anthony Weiner’s sexting transcript look like a passage from Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. Reprinting it here with the words bleeped out would make it too confusing.

Huebsch’s response to his staffers? “I think this goes in the ‘opposed’ stack,” he wrote.

(Incidentally, it is speculated that Branski is the same guy who showed up at a Tea Party rally and began hurling expletives at a 14-year-old girl who was speaking. Remember this guy?)

In more consequential news, the state Government Accountability Board certified recall elections against three Democratic state senators who fled the state during the hectic collective-bargaining debate. Those three elections will be held on a different day than the six recall elections faced by Republican state senators who voted for the collective-bargaining rollbacks. If Republicans can pick up just one of the Democratic seats, it will go a long way in offsetting the three seats Democrats need to pick up to regain a majority in the senate.

— Christian Schneider is a senior fellow at the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute.