Scott Walker is (Still) Winning in Madison

With apologies to William Shakespeare, allow me summarize the recall effort in Wisconsin:

The Recall’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

Polls are coming out from even Democrat sources indicating that Scott Walker has at least a 5 point lead on the best possible Democrat challenger, Tom Barrett.

This, after 14 months of non-stop rallies, protests, boycotts, accusations, allegations, lies, threats and intimidation and millions and millions of dollars.

As the kids today say:  EPIC.  FAIL.

Dem’s Suit on Fake Candidates Shows Electoral Weakness

The Democrat Party of Wisconsin has had a surrogate file a complaint with the GAB seeking to have candidates removed from the Democrat primary ballots for the state senate recall elections.  Given the radical nature of the GAB, they might get the ruling they want, but it is unlikely.

I think the bigger picture is being overlooked by some conservatives.  Conservatives have rightly concluded that this is an effort by Democrats to move the state senate general recall elections forward to the same date as the governor recall primary.  In plain english, they want to have the senate recalls to happen when Democrat voter turnout will be highest due to the Falk/Barret race.

Certainly this is a transparent effort to make a win in a senate recall more possible, but it also betrays a deeper truth.  Democrats may just have concluded that they are going to lose all 4 senate recall races under normal election circumstances.

Wisconsin – Always on The Cutting Edge of Politics

Most people in the US probably couldn’t tell you where Wisconsin is.  All they may know is that is someplace north of Chicago and that it has a few cities with major league sports teams.  Wisconsin is the definition of “fly over country”, and most people here like it that way.

Wisconsin’s anonymity however does not extend to the world of politics, and it has been this way for a long, long time.  It seems that Wisconsin is the place that movements that eventually sweep the nation are born.  Wisconsin is the “leading indicator” of the political world.

Open Letter to Iron Workers Local 8

I see that you have changed your marquee sign along I-94 just over the Milwaukee County border.  It used to say “1 million Wisconsinites can’t be wrong“

Now it says “I thought democracy was for the people, not the corporations or the parties“.

I assume that this message is referring to the recent Democrat-led defeat of the mining legislation in the Wisconsin Senate that would have resulted in new union jobs in Milwaukee and other parts of Wisconsin.

I have a suggestion for another marquee message that might be more appropriate, especially in the minds of your members.

“I thought unions were for the members, not the leaders or the parties“.

I appreciate that recent events have caused you to question some things, but I think you, the members, should be asking some very hard questions of your leadership right now.  Specifically, I think you should be very concerned that your union leaders are far more interested in state politics than your interests.

One Wisconsin Now – Meet Uncle RICO

One Wisconsin Now, along with multiple affiliated groups, turned in recall petitions signed, allegedly, by 1 million Wisconsin residents on Tuesday, Jan. 17, 2011.  The Wisconsin Government [lack of] Accountability Board finally decided tonight to follow black letter law and release the scanned documents to the public.

After review, One Wisconsin Now et. al. may have a problem with that they haven’t considered. It could be a really big one, actually.

See, there is little thing called RICO that is a pretty powerful criminal, and more importantly, civil tool. You may recall (pun intended) the attempt to sue Pro Life groups under the RICO statutes. While the suit failed, it was certainly an expensive endeavor for the defendants, and a conviction/judgement under RICO was not a long shot.

So how can this statute have anything to do at all with the Wisconsin Recall Walker effort? Well…..let me just explain.

(Note: I am not a lawyer, but I play one on a blog. Kinda like Alec Baldwin played a pilot, I guess.)

The Democrats’ WI Problem

Wisconsin politics has been dominated by the Democrat and Public Sector Union’s recall efforts for over a year now.  Conventional wisdom is that the resistance to Scott Walker did not begin until the budget battle and passage of Act 10 (limiting public sector collective bargaining rights).

Actually, the truth is that the resistance to Walker began before he was even sworn in.  The day of the 2010 election, Nov. 2 2010, the domain name www.recallscottwalker.com was registered.  Googling the term “Recall Scott Walker“ for the period of 11/2/2010 – 12/31/2010 yields an astonishing 10,600 results. (This one is the first on the list…please check it out, especially the comments section.)  In this period, Walker was not yet even Governor and had could have done nothing to merit recall.

For comparison purposes, a Google search of the term “Recall Jim Doyle” for the identical period following his first election (11/5/2002 – 12/31/2002) yields 0 results.  Zero.  Zip.  Nada.  Even allowing for the fact that the internet was not the pervasive tool it is today, that is stunning.

This points to a big problem the Democrats have in WI, and they may not even know it yet.

With all this anger directed at Walker, what happens if they win?  And is that worse than if they lose?

For the GOP Elite, Even A Win Is Not A Win

I have received a lot of feedback related to my last posting regarding the political situation in WI.  Some of it has come from “insiders” in the conservative movement and GOP elite types.

They all seem to have one thing in common.  The conventional wisdom (if you can call it that) is that the GOP and Walker “got their butts kicked” in the 2011 elections following the Act 10 budget battle.

I’m not sure what exactly a butt kicking in politics is from an empirical standpoint, but I think it would probably look like the defeat that was handed to Walter Mondale in 1984 or to Democrats in the US House in 2010.  Both were pretty massive defeats.

How does WI in 2011 measure up?

A Battle For the Ages in Wisconsin

Wisconsin unbelievably has been the center of the political universe for the last year. Starting with the election of Scott Walker as governor and the GOP taking control of both houses of the state legislature, my home state has been the focus of an epic struggle between two very different philosophies.

No, not liberal and conservative, although that is part of it. The two sides at war with one another are far larger than that.

Kloppenburg Loses “on the River”

I love to play Texas Hold ‘em, and while I am no pro I do understand the game well enough to understand what can happen when you go all in on a weak hand.  The results are usually not very good.

In the Wisconsin Supreme Court race, the left pushed all in while holding a pair of deuces in a heads up match with the conservative movement. (For the non-poker crowd, when you push all in if you lose you are done playing.)

The conservatives called with an Ace – King (known in the game as “Big Slick”).

In plain english, the advantage at the beginning of the hand was to Kloppenburg and her union goon allies.  However, there was a large chance that the lead would not hold up.

A Nation of Laws or of Men?

The American experiment was, from the outset, a break from eons of human history where there were some who were considered to be above the law.  The founders vision was a system that, among other things, placed the law as supreme in all things.  No man and no institution was ever to be able to flaunt the laws that organize our nation, and her states, with impunity.

In Wisconsin, are we are seeing a political movement undoing over 200 years of these principles?

The protests at the state capital now entering their 3rd week are an expression of the freedoms granted to all by their creator, and enumerated by the founders in the Constitution.  Freedom to speak, to peaceably assemble, and petition their government are all essential to the principle of the rule of law.  I fully support the rights of those gathered to protest, as long as they do so within the laws governing peaceful assembly.

But there are also elements of this efforts led by unions and the Democrat party that are very disturbing to those of us who still strongly hold to principles of the rule of law.