Tuesday, June 26, 2012

The Good, The Bad And The Truly Incredulous

Last night, I wrote about the facts revealed by two motions filed by Milwaukee County Assistant District Attorney Bruce Landgraf in regards to motions to dismiss and suppress charges against Tim Russell.

Today, the rest of the world caught up to the gentle reader and made their reports, with mixed results.

Marie Rohde, writing for WisPolitics.com, did a very able job in her report and covered all the basis. This is what a news article should look like.

Steve Schultze at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel didn't do nearly as well as Rohde with his original minimalist article.  He then beefed it up and made it better, probably due to Aunt Bee showing him up by linking to my post, but failed to do a lot of follow through questions regarding Sykes' knowledge of the source of the information.

Furthermore, there is this:

In another disclosure in Landgraf's court filing, a copy of a letter to Russell's lawyer is included that says Milwaukee County Supervisor Joe Sanfelippo gave a statement to prosecutors. Russell had sought that and numerous other documents from prosecutors to help prepare his defense. 
Sanfelippo said Tuesday that he was an Operation Freedom board member and that he had volunteered serving food at the event.
What Schultze doesn't report, and maybe isn't even aware of, is that Kelly Rindfleisch had been observed in Sanfelippo's office a number of times, discussing campaign issues and other political topics.  This is, of course, a very distinct no-no.  It is illegal to do political work in a government office.

Then there is Rick Esenberg, who takes money from the Bradley Foundation and works hand in hand with Citizens for a Responsible Government, and yet considers himself to be a credible resource. He takes his leave of absence from reality with this:

This would make him a recipient of a leak - not its source.  There is no evidence that that he was under any legal obligation not to pass it along. Who the initial source was - and whether there was a leak that violated a secrecy order - remains unknown. And that is the more critical question.
Nor does the e-mail establish that Sykes was being “hypocritical” for complaining of leaks from the Doe. To the contrary, it substantiated his complaints, even as it did not reveal the original source.
The September 26, 2010 e-mail from John HIller to then County Executive Walker is no more illuminating. Apparently Hiller found out that Dan Bice was writing a story, talked with him about the story and reported on the conversation to Walker. In the course of the e-mail, Hiller says that Bice told him that he got "much" of his "information" from one of Darlene Wink's attorneys who send him an e-mail defending her. But what that "information" was and whether revealing it would have violated a secrecy order is not revealed. (Indeed, if the lawyer had breached secrecy, he would have almost certainly asked Bice for confidentiality which he obviously did not. If he had, Bice would hardly have identified him to Hiller.)
I don't even know where to go with this. You can't argue against insanity.  Not only does Esenberg fabricate things, he totally misconstrues what is there and tries to make it fit into his own skewed sense of reality.  Then again, I have already pointed out that people have a hard time dealing with reality when it conflicts with their own ill-formed perceptions.  Esenberg has thrown full in with Walker and cannot accept the fact yet that he was wrong.

But I eagerly await Esenberg's essay on how photos of the Earth show that it's flat.

4 comments:

  1. The need to be right is the sign of a vulgar mind.
    ~ Albert Camus

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  2. Fyi, you missed that another of your gentle readers, JS commenter creamcity, beat Auntie Bee by a considerable amount of time in tipping other commenters to this blog as a better source than that JS story.

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  3. I enjoyed reading the link you provided yesterday, the one where Landgraf explains the whole "laundry list" in detail. I was surprised that other blogs/articles hadn't included the information. I thought I was missing something.

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  4. This line from Esenberg is especially rich: "Nor does the e-mail establish that Sykes was being 'hypocritical' for complaining of leaks from the Doe.To the contrary, it substantiated his complaints, even as it did not reveal the original source."

    Maybe Sykes was not being hypocritical, but he sure as hell was being disingenuous. After all, he selectively revealed information in order to get his listeners to conclude that someone besides the real leaker was to blame. And that's also another example of the now commonplace GOP penchant for projecting their own inadequacies and failings onto their opponents.

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