To Mike Tate, Peter Barca and Chris Larson! Please Do The Right Thing!

By Jeff Simpson

After a recent election drubbing, its time to lick the wounds and move on.   It is also time to move on with new leadership all across the board! 

That starts especially in the State Assembly where Peter Barca has overseen a complete transformation from being the majority party to being a party that hold the same amount of power as the office cactus(water rarely but usually pretend its not there).    Barca, overseeing the Assembly races, let 26 of the seats go unchallenged.   Does he even try anymore?  

Why in the world with that record he would want to continue on is beyond me.  Unfortunately for the left side of WI he does.   Fortunately though Evan Goyke is stepping up to challenge him!  if you are lucky enough to live in one of the few districts represented by a Democrat that is left, call your rep and say  - "Please for all that is Holy do NOT vote for Peter Barca to be Minority Leader.  Fine Assemblyman, horrendous Minority leader." (or something to that extent). 

Chris Larson, fresh off the Pat Bohmack debacle, is running again.  While Mr. Larson blatantly mishandled this Senate race and cost the dems a seat, he has only done it one term.   I would not be opposed to giving him another chance, BUT Jennifer Schilling is challenging him(sad Kathleen Vinehout isn't).  I highly recommend voting Schilling!  

Which bring us to Mike Tate.    Mike Tate has a long record of massive failure and this years election was no exception.  As Callen Harty pointed out, his record is not pretty!

Below are some of the highlights of Tate’s career.
He was the State Field Director for Kathleen Falk’s losing bid for the governorship in 2002. In 2004, a year before he graduated from the University of Wisconsin with a bachelor’s degree in political science, he was named the Deputy State Director of America Coming Together (ACT). The national organization disbanded in 2005.
Also in 2004 he served as the State Director of Dean for America. Howard Dean had lost several primaries by the time Wisconsin’s came up. Dean had pretty much listed Wisconsin as a must win and indicated he believed that a win in Wisconsin could turn his entire campaign around and lead him to the Presidency. Under Mike Tate’s leadership of the state campaign Dean finished third here with only 18% of the vote. It pretty much ended his campaign and any chance of becoming President.
Fair Wisconsin in its desperate bid to defeat the 2006 Constitutional amendment banning gay marriage in the state of Wisconsin hired Mike Tate to lead the campaign against it. The citizens of the state voted for the amendment with just under 60% of the voters supporting discrimination against their fellow citizens.
In 2008 he was the Executive Director of Advancing Wisconsin, a group that funneled money into the 2008 campaign to elect Barack Obama. Obama did win Wisconsin that year, one of the few things Tate has been associated with where his candidate or position fared well. According to an NPR special series called “secret money project” by Will Evans (11/3/08) Tate was quoted as saying that instead of the group fading away after the election he wanted to create “a permanent grassroots field-organizing infrastructure in Wisconsin.” Great idea if it were true. The organization’s website is no longer active and they are no longer registered with the Internal Revenue Service.
After his service with Advancing Wisconsin Tate became the chairman of Wisconsin’s Democratic Party. There has not been much to cheer about during his tenure. Wisconsin lost one of its most popular Senators when Russ Feingold fell to Ron Johnson. Also in that time Scott Walker won the governorship in 2010, became the first governor in U. S. history to survive a recall election, and proceeded to win re-election in 2014. The Democrats put forth Milwaukee mayor Tom Barrett against Walker in 2010 and tried him again in the recall. This year the party, under Tate’s leadership, got behind the virtually unknown businesswoman Mary Burke almost as soon as she announced her candidacy. It was clear they had handpicked her and while Tate denied the party was endorsing her they did everything but come out and say it. Party regulars were denied a meaningful primary and never got fired up for her candidacy. She lost by 5%. Madison and Milwaukee voters did not turn out for her.

The amount of pain his incompetence has cost this state is almost unimaginable.   One good thing to come out of this though, is we finally found a way to bring the state together.  Start a petition to get Mike Tate to resign and people from all over the state will gladly sign it! 

I Signed and I recommend you do too!

It is time that Mr. Tate, Mr Barca and Mr. Larson  do the right thing. Step aside and clear the way for new leadership in our rudderless state.   Continue serving your constituents as well as you have been, work with the new leaders to advance our party, but please do not get in the way of needed and necessary change!

We Need A Mulligan

By Jeff Simpson

Seriously, can we just declared republican rule and giving Scott Walker the keys to our state as a miserably failed experiment and start over by kicking them all out of office in November?

Madison — The expected shortfall for the next two-year state budget now stands at nearly $1.8 billion, or about half of what it was when Gov. Scott Walker took office in January 2011.
The Republican governor resolved a more than $3 billion budget shortfall in the months after taking office, but the latest projections show a gap once again opening in the 2015-'17 budget because of tax cuts enacted by Walker and lawmakers and lagging growth in other state taxes.
The latest estimates by the Legislature's non-partisan budget office jumped by more than $1.1 billion over the previous estimate of a $642 million gap released in May. The projections from the Legislative Fiscal Bureau were released Monday for the budget beginning in July 2015 and ending in June 2017.
These projections aren't final — they could still get better or worse depending on the whims of the global economy. But any weakness in the coming budget will make it harder for state leaders to increase spending on priorities such as schools or cut taxes further for state residents.
"With all the bad economic news working families have dealt with, Gov. Walker's structural deficit is yet another reminder that Wisconsin is heading in the wrong direction," said state Sen. Jennifer Shilling (D-La Crosse), a member of the Legislature's Joint Finance Committee. "This budget crisis was completely avoidable and will only get worse if we don't act now to balance our budget and grow our economy from the bottom up."

I know Scott Walker has broken all of his promises, but did anyone believe him anyway?  

Let's put this era in WIsconsin politics behind us the way we put the Sal Bando Brewer GM years and Bart Starr/Forest Gregg Packers head coaching years behind us in this state.   

Hire professionals, move on and never speak of them again!  

We Haven't Hit Rock Bottom Yet?!

When I was but a lad of nine years old, I got a President for my birthday.  On August 9, 1974, my ninth birthday, Gerald Ford was sworn in as President of the United States.  Ford had the formidable task of trying to heal the nation after it was rocked by the scandalous Richard Nixon.

Nixon was forced to resign in disgrace, because he and his scandalous behaviors had taken the nation to rock bottom - the point at which the people wouldn't and couldn't stand it any more and demanded  change to the situation.

Fast forward too many years and I again find myself receiving two politicians, Jessica King and Jennifer Shilling, for my birthday.  And as with Ford, these two were elected because of their predecessors' scandalous and amoral behaviors.

The two Republicans they defeated were scoundrels through and through.  Dan Kapanke, defeated by Shilling, had a long history of violating campaign finance laws and the Freedom of Information Act.  Randy Randy "Bed" Hopper was having an adulterous affair with a lobbyist and not even living in the district he represented or voted in.

But what really got the citizens of the state riled up was how they unquestioningly went along with Scott Walker's assault on the working class, the poor, women and even kids.

Having hit rock bottom for many people, they demanded that these attacks stop. When the Republicans willfully failed to heed the people, the people took up their legal rights and initiated recalls.

Six Republicans were at risk of losing their seats in recalls.  But after the dust settled, only the two seats were claimed back by the people.  Two of the surviving Republicans, Robert Cowles and Sheila Harsdorf, were in districts so red that, as one tweeter quipped, they'd vote for a goat if it had an "R" after its name.  Another Republican, Luther Olson, won by a narrow margin, even though he hails from the birthplace of the GOP.

The last race, which was awarded to incumbent Alberta Darling, is shrouded in yet another scandalous cloud of incompetence and election tampering in Waukesha County.

Now two of the Democrats did themselves no favors by shooting themselves in the foot with some really stupid mistakes.  Shelly Moore, running against Harsdorf, fumbled out of the starting gate by using public school email for her campaign.  Sandy Pasch failed to make a clear divide between her campaign and an action committee she is part of, including using the committee's treasurer as her campaign treasurer.

While the Republicans are crowing that this is some sort of mandate, like Darling is foolishly doing, it is anything but that.  First of all, they lost two seats and the Democrats have lost none.  Secondly, while millions of Wisconsinites are seeing what's happening, and are righteously outraged by it, there are still millions more that haven't hit that rock bottom point yet.

I can't say when it will happen, but they too will reach the point that the rest of us are at.  It could be when they realize their schools aren't in the great shape that Walker and the Republicans claim, and their kids are piled into overly-filled classrooms.  It could be when the fee hikes kick in and they're paying much, much more than they've ever had to pay before.  It could be when a loved one, a friend or a neighbor loses or is unable to gain the assistance they need due to severe budget cuts to the programs they need.  It could be when they lose their job when their employer has to close because money is being taken out of the hands of the people and into the coffers of wealthy bankers and businessmen.  It could be when they lose a friend who was shot by a "responsible citizen" exercising their right to carry a gun, even if they aren't properly trained or even fit to be armed.  It could be when they realize they aren't able to make enough money to keep their house, because the unions which kept their wages at a sustainable level are no longer there to protect them, even if they never belonged to the union.

It could be any one of hundreds of different things.

But the one thing that is guaranteed is that eventually the majority of people will finally hit rock bottom and come to realize what a toxic miasma the Republicans are making of our state.

And then we can take the next step in reclaiming our state and continuing the healing process. I only hope it's before too many people get irreparably hurt by the Republicans' maleficence.

Until then, I would just like to thank my fellow Wisconsinites for the lovely birthday gift of two more senators who will do right for the people of this once and future great State of Wisconsin.

A Tale Of A Rat, A Snake And A Mole(man)

Sen. Kapanke describing
the money he is getting
from the Koch Bros.

Soon to be former State Senator Dan Kapanke just can't handle following ethical behavior.  Despite his already lengthy history of having ethics problems, he has gone and gotten himself entangled into another mess.

Dan Bice, one of the few people at Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that I still respect, reported on the latest apparent shenanigan from Kapanke:

In a newly obtained secret recording of the La Crosse County Republican Party meeting on May 25, party officials claim they talked with a staffer for Sen. Dan Kapanke and a top GOP official about taking steps to extend the campaign and delay the recall vote.

This conversation took place in the same meeting in which La Crosse County Republicans discussed running a spoiler candidate against Democrat Jennifer Shilling in an effort to delay the Kapanke's recall election. The move, they said, would give Kapanke more time to campaign and force Dems to spend more cash.

Of course, Kapanke backpedaled from this as fast as his little rat legs could carry him.

But Bice doesn't stop there. He also reports that the rat had talks with a snake as well:

But in the new recording, Chris Rochester, who oversees public relations for the La Crosse Republican Party, said, "I would just advise, I guess, having talked to Dan’s campaign manager, to make sure that as the process goes along, we know that it would be better for them to have an extended period of time."

La Crosse County Republican Party Vice Chairman Julian Bradley responds, "Yes, but this is a wish that comes from the RPW's political director, Mark Jefferson."

Jefferson is the former executive director of the state Republican Party who recently left to take a post with the national GOP. He could not be reached for comment.

So this is some part of the new WISGOP policy and procedures? It does bring one's mind back to Scott Walker's infamous phone call with the fake David Koch, where he admitted that they were considering using plants and where he asked Koch for help with trying to defend his corrupt and amoral allies in the state senate.

There has been some speculation on why WISGOP would want to delay the recall election and run a spoiler candidate. Some have hypothesized that it is to cause Jennifer Shilling, Kapanke's Democratic opponent, to spend money and get smeared before the election by someone else.  David Dayen of Firedoglake feels it more likely that they just want to hold onto their death grip of the government and the state longer to implement more of their profit and power grabbing laws.

This story takes an interesting twist as well.

The La Crosse Republican Party is planning on suing the person who videotaped* this particularly damning speech.  That's very much like a gang of thieves saying their going to sue the person who snitched on them and prevented a big heist they were planning.

Interesting, the people involved fall all over themselves in trying to deny that there was ever any sort of plot only to admit that they still might be planning on it (emphasis mine):

She again said the campaign is not seeking a candidate to challenge Shilling in a primary.
"It is not something the campaign is discussing with anybody," she said.

Harrington also said she had no knowledge of the county GOP's plan to sue the person who made the tape.

Wisconsin law says it is legal for a person to record a conversation if one party gives consent. It also says consent is not required if the person being recorded does not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in that communication.

Feehan, the party chairman, said that since Bradley made comments early in the meeting that it should not be recorded, the person who made the tape had broken the law.

"We're not going to take this laying down," Feehan said.

He also said there are some in the party still considering a spoiler candidate but declined to say if it was an official party strategy.

Now, I've dealt with these things long enough to see that they are saying that they're not talking now, but not they are not denying having talked about it at all, which could very well mean that they already have things in place.

Also, given their past behaviors with myself and Professor Cronon and others, their threat to sue seems more likely an attempt to distract from their own misdoings and push people's attention elsewhere.

This is really only throwing gas on the fire, but it also only emphasizes that the fact that La Crosse could run a discarded tennis shoe and receive better representation than they are from Kapanke.  He's as dirty as they come and really needs to go.

*Odd thing is I thought WISGOP loved themselves some molemen.

Whereas Dan Kapanke Just Soiled His Knickers

For those that might have missed it, there were three special elections held on Tuesday, to fill the seats of legislators who were appointed to fill slots in the Walker Regime.  As you can imagine, since Walker only would appoint those loyal to his paper throne, all three appointees are staunch Republicans who have safely held their seats for years.

It was expected that all three seats would remain red.

But lo and behold, one of the seats did turn to blue. That seat belonged to Mike Huebsch, who became Walker's number one henchman.  Now it belongs to Democrat Steve Doyle.

That now make two out of the three representative districts in Senator Dan Kapanke's district a strong blue.

Well, he still has a couple of months to try to get the people to understand why his voting to take away their rights is really in their best interest.  Then he can relax as he watches Senator Jennifer Shilling get sworn into to fill his former seat.

Senator Shilling Has Such A Nice Ring To It

If the gentle reader remembers, State Senator Dan Kapanke was the first of the Republican Senators to have recall papers filed against them, beating out even Randy Randy "Bed" Hopper.

Today, Representative Jennifer Shilling announced that she will be running to fill that seat. From her press release:

“When the working families of the Coulee region needed Senator Kapanke the most, he turned his back on them," said Rep. Shilling. "Senator Kapanke stopped listening to the people he was elected to serve, and it's time to move in a new direction."

Shilling noted that the citizens of Western Wisconsin have clearly rejected Governor Walker's attack on the rights of workers as well as his attempt to slash millions in vital education and health care funding.  Despite this overwhelming opposition, she noted, Sen. Kapanke has continued to toe the party line.

"We don't need more politicians to stand with the Governor," Shilling concluded, "We need leaders to stand up to the Governor!"

If elected, Shilling said her number one goal will be creating good local jobs and putting Wisconsin's government back on the side of working families.

"I'm running because I want our children to grow up in a state that values good jobs, quality education, affordable health care, and respects working people and their families," concluded Shilling.  "Together, we can keep the Wisconsin dream alive, and put our government back on the side of the hardworking men and women who make this such a great place to live and raise a family."

Methinks that Shilling has more than a decent shot of winning this race, too. Not has she only shown herself to be courageous during the ordeal of the Fitzwalkerstan campaign against Wisconsin, but Kapanke is exceptionally vulnerable.

He won his last election for the state senate by 2800 votes, or only 3% of the total votes. The latest poll numbers I saw on him were pretty low and that was before they tried to illegally ram through the unethical and misnamed "Budget Repair Bill."

And I would be surprised if Shilling didn't bring up Kapanke's legal problems, when he was caught, not just once, but twice, for illegally using charity funds for personal gain.  There was also the violation of the open records law that he was found guilty of in 2009.  That one cost tax payers $38,000 to pay for his legal defense fund.  I can't imagine that one will sit well with either side.

You can get help taking our great state back by helping Shilling in her race by donating here.