Alberta Darling's It-Couldn't-Get-Any-Worse Week Did Just That

Alberta Darling's head must just be spinning as fast as her campaign is spinning all of the week's events.  The poor darling Darling thought she was Queen of the Senate, able to dismiss what we peons and peasants had to say as she rewarded her moneyed peers with gifts of tax payer-funded largesse.

But this week has had an unprecedented number of things come out that must leave her feeling utterly gobsmacked.

On Monday, the empresses' new clothes became apparent to all when it was revealed that she's not representing  her own constituents, much less 99.5% of Wisconsinites.

Tuesday outdid Monday when she became a walking gaffe machine, not able to name even one company that benefited from her draconian policies or one job she created.  She also admitted to her own doubts of winning next Tuesday. Perhaps she's taken a close look at her record and realized that she wouldn't vote for herself.

Wednesday looked like it was the nadir of the campaign for her when it turned out that the jobs she finally got around to claiming as being created by her were actually due to former Governor Jim Doyle and her opponent, Sandy Pasch.

But then came Thursday.

Thursday took the other three days and made them look like she was a lottery winner on each of them.

It started early too, when Progressive Change Campaign Committee, Democracy for America and MoveOn.org teamed up for a massive ad buy to run this commercial in which Republicans express their shame of Darling and how they're going to vote for Pasch:



And this was the best part of her day.

It was also revealed that she "misspoke" regarding the timing of her departure from the Board of Directors of Planned Parenthood. Darling had claimed she left the board before she was elected to the State Assembly in 1990. Turns out that she was there for a full five years after being elected.

To top it off, she then claimed that she left PP because they started focusing on abortions. She also used that excuse for why she cut funding to them in the current state budget. But was that the real reason? It seems unlikely:

Atkinson questioned why Darling, a co-chair of the Legislature's Joint Finance Committee, would make an amendment to defund Planned Parenthood, which could lead to the closing of clinics across the state.

"Her amendment eliminated state support to nine health centers serving 12,000 patients in small communities like Kenosha, Oshkosh, Fond du Lac and Wisconsin Rapids," Atkinson said in the statement. "The essential health care services provided at these health centers include life-saving cancer screenings, birth control and STD testing and treatment. Abortion care is not provided at these health centers."

And even this was small potatoes compared to the big story of the day.

On Monday, I wrote this (emphasis mine for this post):

t started out when we learned that she's being sued by One Wisconsin Now because she has, for two months, refused to even respond to an open records request for any communications between her office and a number of conservative groups and their members, which are pushing for the privatization of our schools. The only rational explanation for not even putting up a stall tactic with OWN is because there's been scads of contact between them, which would raise some serious ethical and legal questions for her. (This makes the accusations her campaign has been throwing around look all the more hypocritical and desperate.)

Again, I must be some sort of prophet.

Today it was found that OWN wasn't the only one she was playing stalling games with. She was also violating the rights of Cory Liebmann, Lisa Kaiser of the Shepherd Express and the Democratic Party of Wisconsin.

When Darling finally felt compelled by OWN's lawsuit to release these long awaited documents, the reason for her stalling quickly became clear.  It was indeed a cover up.

It turns out that she was having a lot of communication with the pro-privatization of the the schools, even as she was putting the political goals of these groups into law.  The same groups whom, after she just lavished all the the goodies on them, invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in ads to support her re-election.

SIDENOTE: If all of Darling's dirty deeds weren't enough to sicken the average person, one of the bills she pushed through is detrimental to the most vulnerable of the vulnerable - special needs children.

Between Darling's continuing refusal to fill the DPW's open records request regarding her communication with Wisconsin Right to Life (who already is under investigation for likely criminal behavior) and the fact that they already have strong proof that Darling was in apparent collusion with the other ultra-right wing groups, the DPW has filed a complaint with the GAB and other jurisdictions regarding this possibly felonious behavior.

Now it's just a question if enough voters are paying attention and are outraged enough to stop this corruption.

But it's not all bad news for Darling.

She's now officially in contention with Scott Walker for the title of being the most corrupt and the most inept politician in the state.

Acknowledgments for their help: Cory Liebmann, Tom Foley, One Wisconsin Now.