Every Rodeo Has A Clown

As the conservatives continue to try to conflate and obfuscate and tantrum in the hopes to change the fact that Van Wanggaard lost his state senate seat, the reach new and even deeper lows.

Appearing through the dust that the Republicans are kicking up in their tantrums comes the Red Fox, aka A-Rod, aka The Hispanic Conservative, aka Aaron Rodriguez. On his corporate media blogsite, Rodriguez comes up with this bit of rodeo clown antics, making some rather presumptive and unsubstantiated accusations:

Following a tip from a Racine student, we did some canvassing of our own.

A student reported that when he was approached to sign a petition, he told the man he wasn’t yet 18 years old. The petitioner said this wouldn’t be an issue since nobody would verify their ages, the student said. Unsettled by what he had heard, the boy said he went home and began cross-checking names in the Racine Horlick, Case, and Washington Park yearbooks with the names listed on Wanggaard’s online recall petition. After two weeks of meticulous work, he claimed to have found more than 300 name matches.

I sat down with the student - including several of his friends - and we went through Racine Horlick’s yearbook for three hours canvassing all the freshmen, sophomores, and juniors in the school. We found that more than 120 names that matched the names on Wanggaard’s recall petition. We excluded high school seniors since some might have been 18 at the time they had signed. It’s possible, of course, that some of the students have the same names as their parents. But what we found should raise questions about the petition drive.

In a rather precocious op-ed by Voces intern Kennia Coronado, she said that youths in Racine have a history and pride in fighting against injustices. “If there is any manipulation taking place,” Coronado explained, “It is being done by those who are painting our efforts as partisan and somehow shady.”

We cross-checked known underage YES members who attend Racine Horlick, Case, and Park high schools and found a few of their names on Wanggaard’s recall petition as well. Due to the relative unavailability of their names, our search was restricted. I called Voces de la Frontera to see if I could get a full list of YES members in Racine, but nobody was available to speak with me at the time of the call.

Let me summarize this: Rodriguez got "a tip" from an unnamed student that said hundreds of other unnamed students signed the recall petition from months and months ago, but is only mentioning it now. He joined forced with the first unnamed student and some of his unnamed friends and confirmed that at least 100 unnamed students signed the petition. This proves everything is illegal and Wanggaard should be state senator until he dies, and then some.

Or something like that.

Oh, and the fact that Rodriguez is still pissed at Voces de la Frontera because they won their suit regarding the illegal and secretive gerrymandering has nothing to do with his post.

My first reaction is that Rodriguez has managed to combine the worst aspects of Media Trackers into one post.

Media Trackers is known for making false allegations of underage youths signing recall petitions in exchange for cigarettes. Of course, this was an absolute fabrication, but they still ran with it.

Media Trackers also helped launch the most disgusting round of McCarthyism we've seen in decades.

Rodriguez manages to do both, using the McCarthy-like checking of lists to see who's the commie as well as throwing out unsubstantiated allegations without a stitch of proof except for the hordes of unnamed teens that seem to plague Racine.

Then again, it shouldn't come as a surprise that Rodriguez would show this lack of journalistic ethics, since he is not afraid of committing libel, such as accusing me of violating federal laws based on nothing. Yeah, this is also the same guy who said that nothing illegal was going on in Scott Walker's county executive office. (How's that working out for you, Aaron?)

I'd complain about the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel giving pixels and ink to this hack, but I realize that corporate media types stick together and Journal Communications gave up any pretense of journalistic integrity a long, long time ago.  Meh, they get what they pay for.

The more desperate that the right becomes in trying to draw attention to Wanggaard's loss and their implications of some sort of fraud, the more I belief that it is an attempt to keep the public's focus off of the highly questionable electronic voting machines which were used in the counties of the Northwoods.  One may recall there was a sudden and unpredicted shift from blue to red.

It might also explain why Command Central, the company that supplied these machines for free, are in such an almighty hurry to get the cartridges and memory packs from those machines so they can override them with for the August primary, instead of simply supplying new ones.