The People vs. Scott Walker

I would vote for you.....

I usually do too
I have a personal policy to write in people I personally know who could do the job better when I see an unopposed race on a ballot. That often includes a vote for myself.
(Side note: I do intend at some point to archive a lot of what I've posted here for posterity, in the absence of having an actual blog or personal journal otherwise.)

I'm in a ranty mood, yes, and these topics are both goldmines, but I gotta touch this other goldmine first.

So for perhaps some insight on how yours truly wound up being such a civics fanatic, this makes me want to bring up some background:

I feel I could've done well going down other paths. Just now as I type that sentence I had a flashback montage of all the times Mom urged me to become a pharmacist, for example. It can take some pushing, and you don't always know when/where they come from until looking in hindsight. I'm in a ranty mood - I'm still residually caffeinated after working all night - so I've got time to kill.

The earliest push in that direction, though I didn't realize it at the time, I can trace is my Grandpa Whitey (Yes, his nickname was Whitey... he got it the same way I got kdogg or Mr. Forward - people just starting using it in lieu of actual name. Like how Conan got CoCo'ed by Tom Hanks, except growing up during the Great Depression. Anyway...)
He wasn't my biological grandfather; he was my mother's stepfather since her preteens, but more of a grandfather to me than either of the men who sired my parents. He worked for one of the Bell phone companies for decades, union worker and Republican through and through. The two were not mutually exclusive; I know he spent time on the picket lines in his day. He met my grandmother working with my mother's hometown's volunteer fire department. Clint Eastwood's Walt Kowalski in Gran Torino reminds me of the man so damn much. I spent a lot of time with him growing up, especially before school age. He retired sometime in the mid-80s, so he was often my babysitter.

One of his sons from his first marriage worked up at the capitol. He was an aide to former Republican Gov. Tommy Thompson. Gov. Thompson was a political powerhouse in this state; he is the state's longest-serving governor, having been elected to four terms before leaving to be in W's Cabinet. Whitey's time babysitting me usually coincided with his "me time" away from Grandma, so I often wound up going along to Madison so Grandpa could see his son.

I didn't really know where it was, except someplace important. I was four or five, that was time for coloring books or toy cars or whatever. My youngest cousin referred to that same building as "the castle" at around that age - even a child knows something's special about that building, even if they can't properly define it. I grew up with a lot of Tommy Thompson swag as a consequence; his name and/or official seal was on a my pencil bag and erasers and such back in elementary school. Whitey loved raiding the freebies; he'd snag them for all us grandkids before school started.

I didn't really understand the presidential deal until 1988 - I knew Reagan was the man in charge, but I never really thought about why. I was in second grade at the time, and that was the year they started working social studies into the curriculum. I voted for Michael Dukakis in my class election solely because I saw him on TV riding a tank, and I thought that was quacking awesome because I was an eight year old boy at the time. (I would like to note that seeing so many of my fellow adult Americans using this mindset as a foundation for political decisions during the past decade made me cringe many a time.)

I was this kid in your class in elementary school and/or junior high:

Paying attention to politics was just a matter of being a classroom go-getter at that point. Social studies was just another subject to be good at. I won the spelling bee and geography bee and stuff like that. My partner on the safety patrol by alphabetical happenstance in 4th/5th grade was Zach, the kid I later beat to win that geography bee, and in our downtime we'd quiz each other on state capitols from across the street. He was my class' Zack Morris, high school class president and all.

Election 1992 had me in sixth grade and covering the subject more in-depth, which meant we had to pay some attention to what was going on outside of class. Even at that fairly young point of political comprehension, I could tell there was something different about Feingold that set him apart from the politicking-as-usual. They were definitely lower-budget than the other ads I was seeing; they seemed more genuine. He painted his campaign promises on his garage door (this was before Contract With America, mind you), toured his house in contrast to his opponents', had an Elvis impersonator endorse him, and one primary ad featured cardboard cutouts of his two opponents slinging mud back and forth at each other. That ad stuck out to me, because it seemed the most accurate depiction of all I'd seen that had been going on. Feingold was a long-shot candidate to win the Democratic nomination that year, let alone the entire Senate race - but he pulled it through.

It wasn't until eighth grade that I really started to care more about civics. A great deal of credit goes to Mr. Kempen for that. He was quite stern and seemed to have zero sense of humor. I swear, you could see the invisible stick up his ass keeping him rigid as he went about his business. The only things decorating his classroom were an American flag, a copy of the Constitution and a Top Gun poster. If you didn't have an answer fast enough in his class, he'd count to three in French before chewing you out in German or maybe Japanese. He threw himself into his field with a passion I've rarely seen, by any occupation's standards. He graded on a harder curve than other teachers. He gave more work than most teachers, but in hindsight it was a lot of general life preparation above and beyond the bare minimum curriculum: a monthlong household budget, maintain a simulated stock market portfolio, stuff like that. Every Monday he'd put us into teams and quiz us on the news; I wasn't the athletic type so this was my weekly throwdown. He was a hardass, no doubt, and a lot of my classmates hated him for that. The teachers throughout my district, on the other hand, saw fit to make him their union president and negotiator. He wasn't my favorite teacher I'd ever had through public school, but he was without a doubt the best.

One thing we did in Kempen's class that steered me towards continued civic interest was the mock trial. He knew which students knew their Leno and which didn't; he made me the defense attorney and I had a lot of fun with it. I made sure to sign up for my mock trial team the following year when I got to high school; I wound up also doing Model UN (where I met my first girlfriend) and taking a lot of social studies classes because I was cool with the teacher advisors. I was college-bound and needed extracurriculars - I was involved in five or six extracurriculars in addition to those civic-oriented ones. My parents couldn't afford to pay my way through, so I had to get as much scholarship money as possible... what I couldn't earn there, I presently hold as $30K+ of student loan debt.

At the senior scholarship ceremony before graduation, we didn't know what we were getting - we just got a letter informing us we'd earned something that would be announced at the ceremony. I knew I was getting a standard scholarship, but I felt a bit miffed when the Mock Trial award was given out and it wasn't my name - nobody else did that all four years. I learned later it was because I won the overall Social Studies award for my class, which was bigger and also came directly from social studies teachers' funds. Along the way, I'd taken all required courses and every elective save one (Sociology) in the department. I also won the local Elks' Lodge Constitution Contest in pursuit of scholarship money; I won it among all schools countywide and was in the top third of the field at state.

While I was in high school, I worked at Wal-Mart for over two years. I'm going to avert another side tangent and just say I'm sure we know that this giant corporation doesn't exactly treat its employees the greatest. I have to concede my time working there helped shape my views about labor and the role of the corporation in society. I got out of there as soon as I turned 18 and had a car decent enough to join some friends delivering for Pizza Hut - another, milder lesson in why I hate working for big corporations.

So I turned eighteen 2 1/2 months before my first eligible election. It was an honor and a privilege to cast my first vote ever for Russ Feingold in November 1998. Governor was the top line on that ballot, and I initially skipped it so I could lose my voting virginity to Russ Feingold. Gov. Thompson won his fourth term in that election. When he was inaugurated, Grandpa Whitey had tickets to the ceremony and I got out of school to go with him, Grandma and one of my uncles. His stepson got us into the governor's office to offer congratulations ahead of the official receiving line. We got a few minutes and were whisked for the official reception. I did meet the newly-elected Attorney General Jim Doyle (later Governor, 2003-2011) and left with the general impression that he was a prick.

The Clinton impeachment was my senior year of high school. That was particularly big news around here - my own Rep. James Sensenbrenner was one of the House prosecutors. I thought it was much ado about nothing... though, being a teenager at the time, I gotta confess I did go to the computer lab during study hall to read the Starr Report when it came out. I figured there'd be something dirty in there, and I was right. The day of the vote, my psych teacher called off his lesson so we could watch it live.

Rep. Sensenbrenner came to speak for an assembly senior year. He did Q&A after his speech. It was shortly after Matthew Shephard was killed over his sexual orientation. I had a friend who had already privately came out to me; I was friends with others who hadn't yet - one of them from mock trial. Hell, I'd taken Leno at school from people who thought I was gay but wasn't. I remember one particular incident where the quarterback, unexpectedly and unprovoked, belted me upside the head and called me "Fag," leaving me with ringing ear for an hour so and a bloody nose. I could only imagine what my actually gay friends had to put up with. I know at various points during my time going to that school, my Jewish friend's locker got vandalized with a swastika and the African-American girl from my OM team got the N a few times. (My school had perhaps five students of each of these minorities...)
As a result of all that, I had a question for my Republican Congressional representative. I didn't ask it as a political opponent, I asked it as someone who had friends putting up with that Leno with which I had also experienced. I asked him, in light of the recent events in Wyoming, his views on the inclusion of sexual orientation as a basis for a hate crime. His response, in brief: gays are evil sinners, and to answer your question: no. I was not cool with that answer.

My high school was the first one to be built around the state in some time, largely due to electorates' reluctance to approve the necessary referenda. I started attending the second year it was in the new building. My school board wanted to showcase it, I'm sure. My hometown's traditional graduation ceremony site was in the park along the river; said park was one of my regular hangouts in high school and I'd been looking forward to graduating there.
The Columbine massacre took place about six weeks where I was set to graduate. The school board seized upon this as an excuse to relocate the graduation ceremonies to the gymnasium, citing the potential of copycat behavior. My graduating class was informed of this during a seniors-only ceremony a month before graduation, which turned into a walkout. Also during said ceremony, the aforementioned quarterback asked a poorly phrased questions about bomb threats and wouldn't drop the point; he was expelled and it was claimed to be because he'd made a bomb threat. I heard what he had said, he wasn't making a threat... he was just being stupid.
So most of my class walked out after the assembly. We tried to challenge it. I managed to get a letter in to the editor in the local newspaper that same day; we got local TV news cameras to come to our town and cover our meeting in the park the next day. Our class tried set up an official petition through city hall, though there were conflicting petitions and it was a bit of a clusterquack.
I went at it from a different angle. I spent subsequent afternoons after school at the local library, poring over local ordinances with another mock trial friend, Skip, who was due to give the official ceremony's commencement speech as our valedictorian. It came to our attention that the school board made their controversial decision in violation of open meetings law - in other words, we had legal grounds for remedy. We set up a meeting with our old mock trial coach, one of the few lawyers in town, and he cited a conflict of interest involving his partner at the firm. By the time we asked around for other lawyers to talk to the next day they all had a conflict of interest due to having been contacted by the school district. Our mock trial coach threw us under the quacking bus when we were right. We weren't even looking to overturn the decision - we just wanted to make the school board follow proper open meetings protocol and give the public advance notice and input in the decision process.
In the end, the graduation ceremony did take place in our high school's gymnasium, but not without us having the last word. We organized a protest ceremony at the park anyway. A local businessman bought us a full-page ad in the local newspaper advertising it. I arranged for a podium from a retiring teacher and was a co-MC. My valedictorian friend, who abdicated his official speech-giving in protest, gave his speech at our ceremony.
Once that ceremony was over, those of us who'd shown up (a majority of the class) walked from the park to the school in caps & gowns for the official ceremony. There was no security measure in place which would've prevented any massacre from taking place; nobody walked through metal detectors or any checkpoint on the way in; the school was as open as it always was despite the "security situation." That further underscored to us that it was just BS maneuvering to show off their new building. At the official ceremony, when we went up on stage to shake hands and receive our diplomas, we had arranged things so that every graduate who disagreed with the relocation decision had an apple to stick in the principal's free hand. She had quite the collection at the end of the ceremony.


This only gets me up through 1999. I would like to think that by that point, I was civically engaged but not necessarily a political animal. There, I think I was willing to get involved with issues that affected me, but I wasn't about to throw my support behind either political party. I didn't necessarily even intend on studying Political Science when I started college; it was years down the line before I decided to pursue/declare that major. If I was made into anything up through high school graduation, it was a citizen who was going to push back when someone screws me. It is my opinion that this pushback is not necessarily political in the partisan sense. It's just standing up for oneself.

Now that I read what I just wrote, I'm almost content to leave it at that. I do feel like I've spilled enough guts for one night, at the very least.

A couple updates pertaining to those mentioned above though, should I choose not to continue...
Grandpa Whitey left us in 2004 after succumbing to Alzheimer's. I'd like to think he'd approve of (most of) what I've been doing, but I can't be sure.
Zach, my safety patrol buddy & class president, grew up to be Sen. Feingold's press secretary. I haven't talked to him since the election, so I'm not sure specifically what he's been up to since.
My valedictorian mock trial friend Skip is an aspiring screenwriter out in Los Angeles these days. I haven't talked to him in a couple months, but we've been playing phone tag. Last time I heard from him was probably early March, when he called to tell me how awesome it can be to recall a shitty governor. He should know... he witnessed only the second one in our nation's history...

...but not for long

Forward!

OK, it was more like five, but whatever. She saw the Solidarity as I was leaving the New Pornographers, broke off from her group and came up saying she wanted to give me a hug. I know she was perhaps in a self-induced hugging mood, and I'll leave it at that. She was cool, we talked for a couple minutes and followed each other's Twitter feeds.
I saw on her feed today that she got Bonnaroo tickets, which kind of surprised me because she was a California native.

We are scheming this very moment

Walker's campaign raised $10,801,716.14, outraising his Democratic opponent by four million.

The citizens of Wisconsin pay their governor $548,368 over the course of a four-year term.

Campaign donors gave candidate Walker nearly twenty times as much to get elected as Wisconsin residents pay Gov. Walker in salary.

I think the problem is pretty obvious.


As for civil unions in Wisconsin, the following amendment to the state constitution was passed by Wisconsin voters in 2006 by a roughly 60-40 margin:
Only a marriage between one man and one woman shall be valid or recognized as a marriage in this state. A legal status identical or substantially similar to that of marriage for unmarried individuals shall not be valid or recognized in this state.
I don't agree with the rules, but it could be quite possible Walker have perfectly logical legal grounds to do so with Wisconsin law as it is.

A brief and incomplete tour of the office. It is a Democratic Party of Wisconsin office, spun off from the main party office to focus on the recall efforts. This particular office - located six blocks from the capitol - just opened at the beginning of the month. I wish I had taken some "before" pictures for comparison, because it was a whole blander place even just a week ago.

Here's the front desk/view when you walk in the front door.


Time out to zero in on something a moment:

Check out the top right quadrant of that artwork. It might look familiar to longtime followers of this thread. I know I recognized its subject immediately:

That picture was taken during the massive 16 & snowing 100k rally back in late February. I thought it was cool seeing my fellow cheesehead revolutionista showing up randomly in the newly-donated artwork.

Moving on...



The rest of the front room, with volunteer shift signup sheets and a day's results. Things have been snowballing quite a bit around the office lately. It seems every day this week, this board has displayed a handful more volunteers and about a hundred more calls than the previous day. That picture was Thursday's total; the guy in charge was excited we were close to four hundred calls on Monday. Things are definitely picking up.
The sign in the office window there with the heart on it is one of my creations. The protests began around Valentine's Day, our fourteen Democratic state senators fled shortly thereafter, so I made the sign with a "WI 14" heart. I'm not sure why its flipside (Leave Medicaid Alone) got chosen to face the street, but I'm not going to argue that point. The heart sign was usually what I left in the back window of my car when I was off raising hell at the capitol.

We call this room The Batcave.

This is where most of the volunteer action happens. All of the data entry and most of the phone calling happens here - we have another room or two people can duck into so there's not too much noise bleed. Of course, status meetings and volunteer training and such as well. I had to train a group on phone calls Wednesday after receiving it once and sitting in on it once; it could've gone better but there's nowhere to go than up forward. That's one of my co-interns Katie in the corner there. Walls are still looking kind of bare, but it's coming along.

The reason/excuse I had to play with my camera and count it as work was because of the overwhelming influx of donations we got. I was working the front desk early afternoon with no volunteers on my watch and stacks of various donations sitting around, so I was in charge of squeezing them all into place Tetris style. I got away with some added slack time by suggesting we document the generosity and send out a thank-you email. So roughly 98% of this stuff was donated in the course of a single day:




The shelves were pretty much empty by the Wednesday night status meeting. We had a few canned food items, 4-5 drinks in the fridge, some granola bars and a few fruit cups in all that space, plus meager amounts of TP & paper towel. What a difference an email makes. Nick, the office director, sent one out to the volunteer list around rush hour on Wednesday when the shelves were bare. I left the office around 8:15-8:30 Wednesday night, picked up about $50 worth of stuff to give to the office Thursday night, and was wowed by just how much we wound up with when I came in at noon today. Nick actually sent out an email early this afternoon asking people not to bring in any more donations until further notice. That massive outpouring of support does nothing but get my hopes up about the busy job ahead.

Tuesday marks Day 100 of these protests and subsequent politicking. I'm going to mark the occasion in the office, at least in part.
The Government Accountability Board has declared that all recalls will be held on July 12th. That is 52 days from today.
We are basically running a six-month campaign on a two-month timeframe here, but I do believe we've got some momentum...

Forward!

Oh, and another random sighting I had on the pizza delivery beat tonight to keep banging the Wisconsin drum:

;D

Updates, because I haven't given them in a while:

There was a special election to fill the Assembly seat vacated by Mike Huebsch, who accepted a position within the Walker administration as head of the Department of Administration. Democrat Steve Doyle won that election, 53-47. This happened a couple weeks ago, but I don't think I mentioned it when it occurred.
Speaking of Mike Huebsch... he was responsible for the damage estimate of $7.5million caused by the occupation of the capitol. The official, non-partisan estimate: $280,000. The occupation of the capitol put an estimated 3-5 years of wear on the building.

The Supreme Court race's recount has officially concluded. Waukesha County was the last to report, requiring several weeks plus an extension beyond the deadline Wisconsin's other 71 counties were able to meet. County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus recused herself from the recount, which was supervised by a retired judge. Waukesha County notwithstanding, with 99% of the recount complete, challenger JoAnne Kloppenburg's lead had expanded by slightly more than three hundred votes. Waukesha County's results confirmed incumbent David Prosser as the winner statewide by about seven thousand votes.
I personally think that these results are tainted. I feel there were issues with the chain of custody of ballots, discrepancies in serial numbers on bags of ballots, Prosser's being in the exact locality in which suspicion originated on the day between the election and when Nickolaus announced she had discovered 14k votes, not to mention Prosser was caught lying when he publicly denied having meetings with Walker in ensuing days, and use of the same election day voting machines in recounts - amongst other things. From what I have read, it seems to me that Kloppenburg gained votes precisely where machine-counted ballots were used on election day and the subsequent recount was conducted entirely by hand.

FitzWalkerstan seeks to reduce the size of the electorate through imposing arguably the most restrictive voter registration law in the nation; Wisconsin has a fraction of a fraction of a percent corruption in this regard otherwise, and the state's current system allows for the second-highest voter participation in the nation.
FitzWalkerstan is prohibiting the collection of data by state law enforcement agencies to determine whether racial profiling occurs.
FitzWalkerstan seeks to prohibit local governments from guaranteeing paid sick/personal leave to employees.
Walker seeks to acquire the same power to declare "financial emergency" in a local government body, which will allow him to dissolve local governments and appoint his own person in charge. This is similar to the law passed and being used in neighboring Michigan... and the law King George III used to dissolve colonial Massachusetts.

Tom Morello was inspired by our protests to record "Union Town EP" under his The Nightwatchman persona, featuring a few originals and protest classics - with proceeds going to labor organizers. I just discovered a dispatch on Madison penned by Morello, dating back to February 25th via Rolling Stone: "Frostbite and Freedom: Tom Morello on the Battle of Madison".
This line in particular sticks out to me: "And if Governor Walker is going to attack the rights of people like my mom, then The Nightwatchman is coming for his ass."
That's exactly what got me out there in the first place, too.

As I understand it, there is also a documentary entitled "We Are Wisconsin" in the works following a number of citizens involved in these protests. Trailer can be seen here but I am unsure of a release date. It appears that one of the six featured protesters in the documentary is Madison police officer Brian Austin, who was the star of the clip I included in the first post of this thread.
Speaking of Madison-based documentaries, a viewing suggestion:
The War At Home is a 1979 Academy Award-nominated documentary about the Vietnam War protests in Madison. It is considered essential viewing for Madisonians.

Coming from my personal viewpoint of being against political parties in general, I feel I must comment that the vast majority of people that identify as Republican, and virtually all of those that identify with the tea party, have little to no ability to realize that the policies they support HURT them. Walker is a scourge to his State and the Nation, and deserves to be ousted with a vote of no-confidence from his people. His policies only serve to feed the oligarchic dream of the Koch brothers who bought Walker's way into office.

Being associated with Hillary Clinton is far better than my association for American Girl...how big of shitty rip offs The Strokes are. (listen to the opening of American Girl and the intro to Last Nite back to back). Ugh, don't get me wrong, I love The Strokes and I've met all of them but Nick and they're all great guys...but damn they are just SO derivative. But that is a tangent for another thread.

Mr. Forward.... Pertaining to you Reaganomics sign:

I've found great pleasure in researching politics as a layman (I'm in school for nursing; politics is just a hobby). One of the greatest tidbits I've found is that the issue of Reaganomics/trickle-down theory is that it has been a political issue dating back to the 1800's. Here's two quotes (old and more recent) for you...

"There are two ideas of government. There are those who believe that if you just legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, that their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous their prosperity will find its way up and through every class that rests upon it." -- William Jennings Bryan (1896 Democratic Presidential candidate)

Circa 1980's in reference to Reaganomics: "Mr. David Stockman has said that supply-side economics was merely a cover for the trickle-down approach to economic policy—what an older and less elegant generation called the horse-and-sparrow theory: If you feed the horse enough oats, some will pass through to the road for the sparrows." -- John Kenneth Galbraith (economist and one of my favorite authors)

Kudos for beating me to the punch on the link.
Too bad the injunction is only as permanent as the Wisconsin Supreme Court allows it to be. I can't necessarily say that I trust them



I've got an "only in Wisconsin" story that seems like business as usual around Madison, but might mildly amuse some of you living in other states.

Even the bratwurst has become politicized in Madison.

Every Memorial Day weekend, on the grounds of the county coliseum/expo center, is held a charity event which bills itself as The World's Largest Brat Fest. Midwesterners generally being modest & honest people, this is actually a legitimate claim. Brat Fest has, on several years in the past decade, claimed the Guinness Book world record for the biggest sausage festival... and tries perennially to break that record. The current record is in the neighborhood of 200K.

It is sponsored by Johnsonville, which is where things get political. Johnsonville was a big contributor to the Walker campaign, which makes them - along with other Wisconsin businesses donating to Walker - the target of a boycott campaign. Madison being Madison, there is of course a protest against the Johnsonville-sponsored Brat Fest.
Actually, three of them... taking place this Saturday & Sunday around Madison are The People's Brat Fest, Alt-BratFest and Wurst Times. Madisonians still enjoy their bratwurst and protesting, and set up their own means of charity fundraising through bratwurst.


I think now might be a good time to say that I recently purchased and have only yet begun to read Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone. I saw it at an end-of-semester half-price book sale and picked it up. I've read select chapters from it in political science course readers, so I'm not completely unfamiliar. I've got a hunch it will help provide some perspective on what happened in the capitol in February and what might lie on the road ahead.

Do you guys have small order shipping capabilities? I'm not a huge fan of Johnsonville Brats regardless of political motives and what have you. I find the taste to be a little funky and bland.

Today at the office, one of my fellow interns and I were talking with the man in charge Nick when he got a phone call with some news.

The Wisconsin Government Accountability Board, the state agency responsible for conducting recall elections, is in the process of determining sufficiency or insufficiency for six recall efforts against state senators. (Translation: figuring out if whether or not they have enough valid signatures to trigger a recall.) They are operating on a June 3rd deadline.
The GAB has already authorized three recalls against Republican state senators. At maximum, there would be six Republican senators recalled & three Democratic senators recalled. The GAB next meets on Tuesday with the deadline looming.

Today, the GAB announced that there will be a delayed determination in all three recalls against Democratic senators. The reason? Signature fraud, misrepresentation of petitions, and the involvement of signature gatherers (largely out-of-state ones) shady enough to have entire pages thrown out. It is expected that the number of likely-disqualified signatures to recall these three Democrats will be enough to render those three recalls insufficient. The GAB decided it will only address sufficiency of the remaining three Republican recalls on Tuesday while fraud allegations are investigated.

There are some big implications to this.
The GAB has presently set July 12th as the date for recall elections statewide. Court proceedings involving these three Democratic recalls could push back the date for all recall elections in Wisconsin. Time will tell.
This could potentially mean that only Republican senators will face recall this summer, in the event all three are thrown out. Even one or two recalls against Democrats disqualified changes the landscape. (If certain among these recall efforts against Democrats do fail, I will know that I personally had a hand in helping make that happen.) Democrats need to gain three seats in recalls, and not worrying about defending Democratic seats from Republican challenges increases that likelihood by allowing for more resources/focus on challenging Republicans facing recall. Not to mention the political shot in the arm that would come from proven fraudulent tactics being embraced by the opposition.

So it was very good news.

When Nick got off the phone, he looked at my fellow intern & I and the first words he said were "You're going to be interns for longer than you thought."
The good news called for a pizza party. Nick dipped into the petty cash and ordered up a couple. Having recently decided to keep the office open Monday and a light volunteer load for the final Memorial weekend Friday shift... we figure it was well deserved. We all gathered and watched some Daily Show projected onto the wall of the back room we call the Batcave. It was kind of the first time I've been in the office where we got to actually stop and socialize aside from in passing, and I finally got to know some of my fellow interns.

It was a nice end to a week full of good news.

On Monday, the GAB certified the first three recall elections, against Republican senators Dan Kapanke, Luther Olsen and Randy Hopper. This guarantees Democrats a chance at winning the minimum number of seats required to change control of the Wisconsin Senate.
On Tuesday, in a special election New York's 26th district, the Democratic candidate narrowly won (+4) in a heavily Republican district. That particular race had as a major issue votes for the Paul Ryan (of Wisconsin's 1st district) Medicare plan. Only one Democrat had been elected to that seat in the past half century.
On Thursday, as discussed above, Judge Sumi issued a permanent injunction against implementation of Walker's bill stripping collective bargaining rights. Unless and until the state supreme court takes the case and decides to overturn Sumi's decision, this bill is dead. The state has to pass a biennial budget by the end of June, which could further inflame the situation. Republicans might have to vote again - with fair warning this time - if they wish to include terminating collective bargaining rights in the budget before then.
Also on Thursday, New Badger Partnership - Walker's plan to sever flagship UW-Madison from the rest of the UW System included in his budget proposal - was officially abandoned by the legislature.
Then this happened on Friday.

Also along the way, new polls show that Walker's approval rating dropped to 43% and his recall was favored among Wisconsinites by 50-47. When hypothetical Walker recall scenarios were posed in these polls, 2010 challenger Tom Barrett (who lost by 6% in November) wins by 7% now. A hypothetical Walker-Feingold recall has Feingold winning by ten points. However, there is a Senate vacancy on the horizon... and Feingold beats the four or five hypothetical opponents by double digits as well. At this point, other would-be candidates for either position are waiting on Feingold to make his move before making their decisions.

All in all, it was a very encouraging week.
I find it extremely gratifying to see someone who came on in such dictatorial fashion up against the ropes like this.



Forward!

Thanks, gonna place an order for a cookout I'm hosting in late June... Might also place one for the 4th of july.

Our hospital is following in the footsteps of the state and have hired a pit bull of an attorney who is trying to castrate our union right now during out current contract negotiations. They are trying to DECREASE our salaries by up to 10%, enact mandatory overtime, increase the percentage of our health coverage that we pay, take away our current holiday pay, change to a PTO method of time off benefits (which would place a cap on the number of hours that you can bank and employees who have been here for years and years would lose time that they have earned) and take away our weekender program (which provides essentially part-time workers who are willing to give up every weekend of the year with a higher pay rate and the right to full-time benefits). They would not BUDGE on anything! No negotiations.

We have voted YAY on our "Intention to Strike" notice, set for June 10th, if they will not at least enter into arbitration with us. We are not state employees, we were SEIU and are now ONA. However, this is the first time since the 1980's that they were so steadfast in their refusal to meet the union on some terms. I think this is a direct ramification of what has been going on in our state, and in yours and in a dozen others across the nation. If this is what is going on with Unions still in place, imagine what will occur if they are successful in stripping us of our rights to organize as workers.