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All the attention on Occupy Wall Street has made it easy to forget another movement going on in the U.S.

Months before anyone spent the night in Zuccotti Park, there was another type of occupation happening in Wisconsin. In February, teachers and other public employees filled the state house to protest a law that would restrict  their rights to collective bargaining.

Now, the fight to unseat Gov. Scott Walker, who proposed the legislation, has officially begun.

The drive to collect an average of 9,000 signatures a day, fueled by anger over Walker’s successful push to take away nearly all public worker collective bargaining rights, began with pajama parties and other events after midnight. Daytime activities included rallies, neighborhood canvasses and booths set up around the state Capitol.”

Walker’s proposal and the protests that followed made national headlines. Since, others Republican governors have attempted similar measures.

The recall effort launches a week after voters in Ohio repealed a similar but harsher collective-bargaining law. The repeal has galvanized anti-Walker forces in Wisconsin, which has long been seen as ground zero for the broader Republican push to curtail union rights as a way to trim state budgets.”

The governor’s opponents will have to collect over half a million signatures to force the recall.

Will Walker’s move against public employees leave him publicly unemployed?

Thanks to MSNBC!

What exactly do you do with all those rhino horns? Illegal ivory trade discovered.

More to say: Lost Steve Jobs’ interview headed to theaters.

Get out and stay  out. Original Occupy site dismantled.

Not so fast, fluoride: County ends longtime practice.

And, what’s Joe Biden doing next to that firetruck?

Kathy Scales Bryan, American studies lecturer, recently commented on a California politician’s daughter who has publicly split with her father on a controversial issue.

Briana Bilbray, the daughter of Republican Congressman Brian Bilbray, recently came out in support of medical marijuana dispensaries and extoled the drug’s therapeutic benefits for chemotherapy patients. Briana is currently in remission from melanoma.

Children of politicians often are brought up to put the public persona ahead of their private lives, Bryan said .

“The understanding within a family is that that’s where you could take care of your needs that can’t be taken care of out in public,” she said. “What being in politics does is take that private place and turn that into a kind of commodity that has to be produced on a public stage.”

The story, “Bilbray’s daughter at center of med pot debate,” appeared on the Sign On San Diego website on November 12.

Steve Bradley (associate professor, Visual Arts) is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Arts in Community (MSAC AIC) matching grant for his “Portrait Stories” initiative in the Baybrook community.

In addition to this grant, “Portrait Stories” has been chosen by the Baltimore Rotterdam Sister City for its Artist Exchange program. The intended exchange will occur between the Baybrook neighborhood and Rotterdam’s Heijplaat neighborhood in the future.

The Baybrook initiatives are rooted in Professor Bradley’s 2009 residency in the Heijplaat neighborhood. His inspiration came from an educational curriculum developed by the Willem de Kooning Academie, also in Rotterdam.

Cut off from downtown Baltimore by the Patapsco River, the richly diverse communities of Brooklyn and Curtis Bay have few safe public recreational places for the youth to gather before or after school. The intergenerational “Portrait Stories” project strives to engage the youth and the elders of Brooklyn and Curtis Bay in a mutual exchange of stories. The objective is for the participants to create portraiture, in response to these stories, to share with the community.

This project is facilitated by students from UMBC and Maryland Institute College of Art for students from the Benjamin Franklin High School and elders from the Brooklyn and Curtis Bay community.

Exhibitions from “Portrait Stories” will be in several locations around Baybrook and Curtis Bay beginning May 2012.