As of 6:58 this morning my website had a stupendous number of hits. It was 7,143. That is better than three times the average number of hits per day on my blog but what makes it truly amazing is that it was not an entire day’s worth of activity. It was only based on visits from midnight to just before 7 AM. I won’t get today’s full statistics until about ten o’clock tomorrow.
If I had any doubt about whether my vigorous posting drives traffic these hits pretty well make the case. It wans when I go silent and waxes strong when I have something to say. That’s good because I will have little to say for next week’s school break. Shortly after I get back I might even have a functioning website set up to take donations for the Johnston Defense fund. I’ve already paid for the website’s domain name. Good, Art’s attorneys don’t work for free not even for the defense of our First Amendment Rights.
My last big post of the day is the one before this. Its already written in rough draft but it should be polished up. Before I work on it I have a couple small items I’d like to share of no great concern to the Art Johnston Saga. They are:
One -Officer Brad Wick won the highest award that can be bestowed on public safety officers at the White House. Twenty years ago Officer Wick was assigned to my children’s school Chester Park and I saw him often during those years when he paid it a call.
Two – I’ve particularly been enjoying the Bygones session since the beginning of the year. I moved to Duluth forty years ago in late August after my marriage. I subscribed to the Tribune within days and so lately every bygones section contains the local news I first read as I became familiar with my new home. A couple days ago there was one that described how the Wisconsin Supreme Court upheld that state’s ban on public employee strikes. The Bygones story reports that this decision will have no impact on a planned strike by Superior, Wisconsin teachers that is set to begin the following week.
Teachers in Minnesota were strike happy by this time when I moved to Duluth to teach in Proctor. I mentioned in an earlier post how today’s Education Minnesota (our only teacher’s union) was then two separate competing unions. The laws in Minnesota had been changed in about 1971 to permit teachers to strike and by the time I began teaching the unions were really going to town. Minnesota’s strike mania must have bled over to Superior but Wisconsin hadn’t cleared the way yet legally. I guess the Superior teachers weren’t going to let that stop them.
Those who wonder at Governor Walker’s virulent anti-public employ stance should remember that there has always been a more stubborn conservative streak in that state and it has continued to the present.
