April 2009 Archives

Good grief!

Wonder how Scott Walker plans to overcome the problem of being from Milwaukee, which outstate voters don't much like?

Deny it.

I am not making this up. Read on.

Doyle, in understanding the spirit of the W-2 law, has seen that in several key ways it is falling short of its purpose. The program was designed to help families, having severe economic difficulties, to get back on there feet through financial, training, and educational assistance. It is absolutely vital, then, that these families be allowed to stay in the program until it has helped them.

Musings on Day One of Scooter Walker's second ill-fated run for governor:

*** Announcing first on Twitter and Charlie Sykes's show was a stroke of genius -- if you think the hard core lunatic fringe and Walker fanatics are going to be enough to win the election. But creative use of the Sykes show is the reason David Clarke is now the mayor of Milwaukee, isn't it?

***How long will the Journal Sentinel let Steve Schultze cover their fair-haired boy if he keeps checking facts, like he did today:

Walker also says Doyle's action - and inaction - harms Wisconsin businesses. The governor's push to enact combined reporting for income taxes on businesses played into Harley-Davidson's latest layoff decision, Walker said...

Harley spokesman Bob Klein said the state's new combined reporting law cost the firm $22.5 million in the first quarter this year, but said that "had nothing to do with our work-force reductions."

*** Walker wishes he were running against Tony Earl:

Jim Doyle "is turning back the clock to the same kind of hopelessness Wisconsin had in the early '80s under (then Gov.) Tony Earl."

Running against a Democrat who's been out of office for 22 years doesn't sound like a great theme to me. No voter under 40 has the foggiest idea who Tony Earl is. But he must have been bad to lose to someone like Tommy Thompson, who they kind of remember as being governor once.

*** Walker, who asked the state to take over the county's public assistance programs because the state was about to do it anyway, based on Walker's incomptence and neglect, now wants the state to pay the bill, too, and is threatening to sue. Good luck with that. Hope we have a lot of court hearings during the campaign to get more of the mess in the record.

*** Walker's soon off on another taxpayer-paid Harley tour to all of the television markets which reach Wisconsin voters, under the guise of promoting Milwaukee tourism:

"We've done it before under similar circumstances. We just make it very clear that we're only going to talk about official business," Walker said. "We're really only going to talk about the purpose of the ride, which is to promote tourism here in southeastern Wisconsin."

"I try to keep a fairly good firewall," Walker said at the House of Harley-Davidson in Greenfield.

Let's watch and see how many times Walker's run for gov is mentioned in those stories -- and then ask him to ante up from his campaign fund, since this is clearly a campaign trip, and has been from the first time he did it.

*** Ed Garvey, who's always poking Doyle for not being liberal enough, can't believe Walker's attacking the gov for being a lefty:

He says Doyle is a lefty who has sold out to liberal special interests. Yah, sure, Scott. If you keep this up Doyle might be invited to Fighting Bob Fest!

Garvey does have Walker's message down pat:

Scott Walker for governor. "He will fill your prisons, raise tuition, stop stem cell research, make abortion a crime, and auction off our parks. Scott Walker. One of us. A return to an earlier time. Scott Walker."

*** Finally, save this one so we can remind GOP Chair Reince Preibus of it a year and a half from now:

He predicted the GOP would help re-elect Van Hollen, take back the guv's office and win majorities in both houses of the Legislature next year.

"I do believe this is going to be a fantastic year for the Republican Party, and I expect us to be able to celebrate in 2010," Priebus said.

*** Bruce Murphy at Milwaukee Magazine says Neumann may run an anti-Milwaukee campaign against Walker:

Neumann could run ads portraying Milwaukee as a hellhole that Walker is responsible for, with high government benefits and taxes, declining parks, a dirty, poorly maintained courthouse, an out-of-control House of Correction and a County Board and executive who are constantly squabbling.

Milwaukee voters, of course, would know this portrayal is a tad unfair.

Actually, not even a tad. Who is responsible if not Scott Walker? Every word in the paragraph above is absolutely fair game.

***The GOP state convention's this weekend, and right wing radio talker Jason Lewis of Minneapolis, a sometime fill-in for Rush Windbag, is the banquet speaker. Mark Belling must have been too expensive.

Cory Liebmann asks whether Neumann will beat Walker in the weekend straw poll. The real question is whether it matters. Ask Tom Barrett, who won the straw poll for governor at the Dem convention in 2005 and 2006, ,but not the primary. Never think that the folks in their funny hats even represent hard core primary voters.

That's all, folks!

The state Senate and Assembly are expected to pass the historic "Equal Pay" bill later today to provide workers who have been discriminated against in employee pay because of their gender a legal recourse other than the over-crowded federal court system.

Authored by Rep. Chris Sinicki and Sen. Dave Hansen, the bill is good for workers and good for businesses. And good news for the state of Wisconsin.

A graduate student in nuclear engineering at UW-Madison, Brian Kiedrowski, has solved the nuclear waste disposal problem -- something the nuclear industry and the federal government have failed at for 50 years. Can a Nobel Prize be far behind?

Details.

From our pals at Health Care for America Now, Wisconsin

Join Tammy Baldwin for a town hall meeting on national health care reform Friday, May 1st, at 5:30pm.

Congresswoman Tammy Baldwin sits on an important Health Subcommittee in the House of Representatives. This could be our last opportunity to speak with Tammy before key votes on various pieces of health care legislation.

Congressional leaders agree that moving a health care will be their main focus after Memorial Day, and final bills could be voted on in the House and Senate before August.

Hi Audience and welcome to the new "torture reality show!"-OK I DID IT!!

Our first contestants have been carefully selected after a painstaking search through documents going back to 2002. We've given our contestants special monikers to avoid undue embarrassment should the tortures result in unseemly (knowing glance to the audience) results. Let's give them a warm torture welcome!
(loud applause)
On my left are Little Rumdum and the Big C
(wild applause)
On my right stand Wild Rice and Little Al
(female WOOOwoooo's and applause)

The masks are to hide their true identities since we did not select the audience based on political beliefs.

Now contestants and audience, here's how the game works. We have chosen this week's torture and someone here will be selected to undergo it for the next week. You will all pick a "Not This Week" card and if it has the right quote on it, you can exercise your veto of the torture should you be chosen. Here are the vetoes:
We'll do memos legalizing everything!
We always knew what we didn't know, when we didn't know it
Was that a mushroom cloud?
You'll damn well give us the intelligence we want , when we want it!

OK - we all have selected a card. Let's go.

Now - who'd like to go first??
(Silence- audience titters)
People, this is a reality show! Someone has to go first! Audience, how about a little help selecting our first "torture survivor"! (wild applause!) (As the moderator, who is wearing a black mask with eye, nose and mouth holes, holds his hand over each of the contestants heads, the audience howls for each with enthusiasm).

Big C! You have clearly won the audience's approval to go first. This week's torture is Waterboarding! We're going to ask you to lie down here with your head tilted back slightly. We'll ask you a few questions and you will try to resist our inquiries, OK? Wave your hands when you want to answer. After the first application, you can play your veto card. Are you ready? Who authored these torture memos?

Uummph, glug, ARRRRGHHHH! (after 2 seconds, hands waving frantically! gluuugh, sputter! It was Carter! I mean Clinton!

Really? We may have to ask that question again (possibly 182 times)

Now - would you like to play your veto card?
YES - PLEASE! STOP!
And your veto card says: "We always knew what we didn't know"
Sorry Big C - that card can only be used by Little Rumdum! Back on the bench
ARRggggh,STOP, IT WAS REAGAN! I SWEAR IT! I WAS THERE YOU KNOW! No stop mummmph.

I'm sorry, Big C - I'm afraid you get the old waterboarding all week- Head back now, please (hey can someone over there help me hold him down)

(Audience squeals with delight) Waterboarding begins again

Thank you so much folks- you've been a great audience. We'll see you back here next week for the next episode of OK, I DID IT! And a new torture for a new contestant. Tune in at the top of the hour for TARPLESS, a great new hour, as failing bank CEO's compete against their Automotive counterparts for the Socialist of the Week Award! See you next week!

It now appears that the highest levels of the Bush administration, which "tortured" their own combat troops into prisons and disrepute for using torture, actually sanctioned the entire mess from the beginning. It is sometimes difficult to imagine the depths of degradation to our morals and our constitutional form of government to which these people sank. So the justification has changed from "it was a few bad apples", to "it wasn't really torture" to "hey it works so what are you complaining about? We kept you safe." The proof is in the classified documents that we said previously you shouldn't release because it makes us look like a banana republic.

Huh?

So releasing any documents that show the truth of the Bush Administration's mendacity, up to and including Rice, Cheney, the Attorney General, probably John Ashcroft etc., is an outrage, jeopardizes our safety, is politically motivated, and makes us a Banana Republic, but releasing far more secret classified documents is OK. Why would this illogical approach hold? Because they know they can use Fox, CNN, Rush, Billo and Hannity to damn you if you do and damn you if you don't.

Release them and they'll find a scrap or two of intel they got for their hundreds of waterboardings of just a couple of guys. Later, they'll attack the Obama administration for releasing the original memos and the follow-ups because if the Obama administration hadn't released memos showing that this renegade, lawless bunch did whatever they wanted, constitution be damned, they wouldn't have had to demand the follow-ups. Get it?

All of this, of course, swirls around but avoids the debate we should be having but never seem to get from the mainstream media: Is torture, which we prohibit by law, and which we have agreed to never do by international law, ok when a U. S. administration wants to do it? Is it OK when we can prove in retrospect that it might have worked to get us a little info? Is it OK for an administration to unilaterally violate our Constitution and International Treaties because they think they are right? This is the real question.

The real answer is simple. It is NO. We are a nation of laws. What that means is that individuals can't decide, no matter their level of authority, what to obey and what not. It goes historically back to the Kings who could do whatever they wanted (and did) and to the British who were pretty much doing so, as far as the American colonies were concerned (not to mention Ireland and 10's of other places in the world) at the time we held a little revolution to ensure we could live freely. The idea of a Constitutional government is to ensure the Rule of Kings cannot prevail. Rulers are elected and limited. Checks and balances are built into the system. Oversight is absolutely necessary and exists to protect the people from governmental excesses.

While consistently railing against big government excesses, this right wing and republican bunch have themselves managed to erode the rights of speech, privacy, assembly, counsel (by under-funding it everywhere in the country) and against unreasonable searches and seizures, over the last 35 years and would now have us abandon our stand against the cruelties of torture, on their say-so. I say NO- Never.

And let me resurrect one of the sayings of the past of which they were so fond: Love it or leave it! If you don't love our Constitutional form of government, get out. Some of us think we have more going on here than an episode of "24". If you think when you're in power, all the laws to protect our liberties can be sacrificed on the altar of fear, we can point you to some countries that operate that way. I'll contribute to your air fare (though I think you should go on a water board). This is the way the Communist Chinese and Russian governments operate. This is the way of Fascism. I'm sure they'd love to have you in their governments. They too are experts at graft, corruption and dictatorship.

On the other hand, if you choose to stay and do whatever you like, we have a legal system where you have to pay the piper. You know all those people in jail for using and selling marijuana?? Remember when you rebuffed the argument that it is basically harmless with "yeah but it's illegal and they chose to do it?" You remember that? Yeah, well so do we.

Best wishes on a very large cellmate,
The Patriot

On Saturday I penned this op-ed which never ran in my local paper about GI Resistance, my planned trip to St. Louis for Matthis Chiroux’s discharge hearing and why war resisters of an illegal war should be supported instead of punished. (For more on Matthis and his refusal of an Inactive Ready Reserve call-up see his website)

On Saturday I penned this op-ed which never ran in my local paper about GI Resistance, my planned trip to St. Louis for Matthis Chiroux’s discharge hearing and why war resisters of an illegal war should be supported instead of punished. (For more on Matthis and his refusal of an Inactive Ready Reserve call-up see his website)

On Saturday I penned this op-ed which never ran in my local paper about GI Resistance, my planned trip to St. Louis for Matthis Chiroux’s discharge hearing and why war resisters of an illegal war should be supported instead of punished. (For more on Matthis and his refusal of an Inactive Ready Reserve call-up see his website)

On Saturday I penned this op-ed which never ran in my local paper about GI Resistance, my planned trip to St. Louis for Matthis Chiroux’s discharge hearing and why war resisters of an illegal war should be supported instead of punished. (For more on Matthis and his refusal of an Inactive Ready Reserve call-up see his website)

The Milwaukee-based Bradley Foundation gives away buttloads of dollar bills every year to conservative orgs  and people so that they can continue to be wrong about issues and still get paid. So it’s no wonder why yesterday the Foundation decided to award conservative columnist and FOXNews commentator Bill Kristol with a $250,000.

Governor Doyle's proposal to increase taxes on oil companies has triggered a wave of the predictable right-wing, pro-business histrionics that we've grown so accustomed to over the last few months. The Wisconsin State Journal has even gotten in on the act, berating the plan as "the wrong choice" for Wisconsin. Really? The wrong choice for Wisconsin?

Are you bleeping kidding me?

Less than one year ago, Americans were paying $4 a gallon at the pump. Oil prices were at a record high of $150 per barrel, and the economy was slowly sliding into a recession. In short, things were bad.

Unless, that is, you were an oil company. Then, you were reaping the benefits of an illegal occupation of Iraq and the subsequent - and equally illegitimate - privatization of that country's oil. At the same time, you were charging Americans an arm and a leg for a resource upon which millions depend. And things were good. Things were very, very good.

$45.2 billion. That was ExxonMobil's profit for 2008. It is also the largest corporate profit ever. In other words, no company has ever made more money in one year. EVER.

Yet this year, the poor old oil companies are facing their lowest profits in almost a decade. If you listened to the State Journal, you'd think these were upstanding, commendable corporations, perhaps even ones in need of a bailout in these direst of times. But once again, people, these companies have been making money hand over fist for the past decade. At the risk of repeating myself, ExxonMobil made more money in 2008 than any company in history. If you had the faintest inkling of common sense, you'd realize that Doyle's tax is the right thing to do.

With such a tax in place, Wisconsin would gain $270 million per year to finance infrastructural growth and repair, in the process creating jobs for the rapidly growing number of unemployed. Perhaps the money could even be used to promote a new green economy, thus reducing our self-destructive reliance on foreign oil and mitigating the suffocating influence of big oil.

The fact is, it's time the oil companies made amends for their egregious political, environmental, and economic offenses of the last ten years. So Mr. Governor, you have my blessing. Ignore the State Journal's nonsense, and make these bastards pay. Their corporations have emptied our pocketbooks, polluted our environment, and destroyed our credibility abroad. It's about time they give something back.

Sexual deviant Bill O'Reilly jumped the shark of reality last night.

I know, pointing out idiocy by the lying O'Reilly is like pointing out vastness in the night sky. It's endless as scientific fact.

Grist, the provocative online environmental magazine with an attitude, asks whether Earth Day, bring celebrated on Wednesday for the 40th year, still has any purpose or relevance.

As the biographer of Gaylord Nelson, Earth Day's founder, my response is probably predictable. Others offer their takes, too.

Happy Earth Day.

Yesterday our NRA-backed Attorney General, JB Van Hollen, claimed that openly carrying a firearm should not result in a disorderly conduct charge in a memorandum issued to Wisconsin’s district attorneys.

Yesterday was also April 20, 2009—ten years to the day after the Columbine Massacre in Colorado: the most infamous school shooting in U.S. history sparked a nationwide debate on tolerance, firearms, schools, the media, and violence.

Making its rounds at the capitol this year is AB38: a bill devised to exclude from taxable income gains from a Wisconsin business. As the Legislative Reference Bureau understands it, a corporation “may exclude the capital gain realized from the sale of any asset held more than one year.” It estimates the bill would decrease revenue by $13.95 million annually.

Its been exactly ten years since the horrific murders of 12 students and a teacher and wounding of 23 more victims at the Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado at the hands of the heavily-armed Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris. Former Bush appointee and current Wisconsin Attorney General JB Van Hollen is commemorating this massacre by issuing a memo to the states district attorneys claiming that openly toting a firearm in the streets should not result in law enforcement charging someone with disorderly conduct.

Van Hollen, who was endorsed in his 2006 bid by the gun manufacturers front group the National Rifle Association, wrote in his memo: The Department (of Justice) believes that mere open carry of a firearm, absent additional facts and circumstances, should not result in a disorderly conduct charge.

On Monday, April 20, the 10th anniversary of the massacre at Columbine High School , Wisconsin Anti-Violence Effort (WAVE) sets off on a journey, covering 450 miles in three days, to raise awareness about gun violence and to call for common sense solutions.

The tour, "A Journey for Justice: Preventing Gun Violence Across Wisconsin", features a display of 450 shirts, representing the victims of gun violence in Wisconsin each year. Nationwide, nearly 30,000 Americans die from gun violence annually.

"Lives lost to gun violence are the ultimate injustice because we know that gun violence is preventable, especially when policy makers and the public make the right choices," said Jeri Bonavia, WAVE's Executive Director. "To see all of these empty shirts in one place, and to know what that emptiness means for the families who have lost loved ones, is a somber reminder that this is a crisis we simply must solve."

WAVE is embarking on this statewide tour, determined to build bi-partisan support for legislation to require background checks on all gun sales. Nearly 85% of Wisconsin's likely voters, including 70% of NRA members and supporters, are in favor of background checks on all gun sales - a common sense and effective method for keeping guns out of the hands of criminals and, ultimately, for preventing gun violence.

You're invited to join one of these media events if you can:

Monday, April 20 - 10:30am
Appleton City Center Plaza
10 E. College Ave, Appleton

Monday, April 20 - 3 pm
UW Stevens Point
Dreyfus University Center - Laird Room
1015 Reserve Street, Stevens Point

Tuesday, April 21 - 10 am
UW LaCrosse
Cartwright Center
1725 State St., LaCrosse

Tuesday, April 21 - 5 pm
State Capitol Rotunda, Madison

Wednesday, April 22 - 12:30pm
Milwaukee City Hall
200 E Wells St., Milwaukee

Her name was Marjorie, but everyone called her Midge.

Midge Miller, the quintessential West Side Madison liberal and tireless activist for peace and progressive causes, has left us at age 86.

The Wisconsin Network for Peace and Justice website has links to moving tributes from John Nichols, Stu Levitan and Paul Soglin.

A memorial service is being planned for Mothers Day, her family said. That's appropriate. She was, among many other things, the mother of the nuclear weapons freeze campaign in Wisconsin.

Midge wasn't a legislator who played it safe or hesitated to introduce things that might be controversial or fail to pass. If she was convinced the cause was righteous, she'd plunge ahead.

I was working at Nukewatch in 1982 when a student, recently transplanted from New York, called to say he'd heard about this idea, a nuclear weapons freeze, that had been passed at some town meetings on the East Coast. He thought maybe Wisconsin could pass something, but didn't know how to get started, or even who his state legislators were.

We determined he lived in Midge Miller's Assembly district and suggested he contact her, thinking that would be the last we'd hear of it.

In short order, Midge had introduced a nuclear freeze resolution in the legislature that put the question to a statewide advisory referendum in September 1982. She worked closely with a coalition of peace groups to get it through the legislature, and then to get it passed by the voters.

Wisconsin became the first state in the nation to pass a statewide nuclear freeze referendum, and by a 3 to 1 margin, thanks to Midge's efforts. And it all started with a phone call from a constituent who had never voted for her and didn't even know her name.

It somehow seems appropriate that after not having seen her for years, I last ran into her in September -- at Fighting Bob Fest, of course. To the end, she was a vital part of Wisconsin's progressive community.

I hope she's resting in peace. She certainly earned it.

The "news" from the latest St. Norbert's poll is that Gov. Doyle is allegedly at the nadir of his popularity, because less than 50 percent are satisfied or very satisfied with his leadership.

Time is ticking and soon the chorus of Wisconsin conservatives will be claiming this "drop in popularity" is due to the Governor needing to raise taxes on those at the absolute top of the economic ladder (no one earning less than $300,000).

This is garbage.

The non non-ideological conservative Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance is once again showing its stripes -- this time shooting out the same talking points being argued by the Republican members of the state's budget writing committee.

As reported on the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's politics blog, WTA head Todd Berry shipped out a newsletter complaining about what is contained in the proposed state budget.

Just a couple of regular guys, fed-up taxpayers taking part in a mainstream, grassroots revolt: 

Your pals at One Wisconsin Now decided to attend Wednesday’s Fox News Teabag Party in Madison – and thanks to all of the screamers, yammerers and name-callers who reinforced our faith in humanity and democracy.

Our mission: make sure a “thank you” was offered by wealthiest one percent, whose potential increase in taxes sparked this corporate-financed event. We also wanted to speak for those impoverished corporations which would have off-shore tax havens closed by the President’s budget.

Have you heard? High level radioactive waste is no big deal. Not to worry. Soon we'll have a way to dispose of it, maybe just fuse it into glass cubes and you can store them under your coffee table or something.

Or maybe it won't happen right away, but certainly within the next century or so, a Wisconsin State Journal columnist assures us.

Being a chronic malcontent, of course, I beg to differ.

Class. Here we have two cable television personalities interviewing public officials. Exhibit A: Rachel Maddow. Exhibit B: Bill O’Reilly. Watch and listen carefully for differences in their journalistic style, they may be hard to miss. Note how each handles differences in opinion from their guest.

The fine individuals financing the racist, lawbreaking All Children Matter, who want to see our public education tax dollars go to private, for-profit companies, have dumped late cash into the Rose Fernandez race.

Reports filed with the state show Betsy DeVos, the Michigan wife of ACM founder Dick DeVos shipped a last-minute $1,000 check to Rose Fernandez's campaign late last week -- undoubtedly in the hopes that she is able to yank even more money from public schools and into K12, Inc., the for-profit company in which she and Dick are invested.

K12, Inc., reported in its SEC prospectus that it expects at least $5 million from Wisconsin taxpayers to operate virtual schools.

More information about interconnections between DeVos, K12, Inc., Rose Fernandez and legislators, lobbyists and the privatizing education movement are available at www.FernandezFiveMillion.com.

Bill Moyers' guest, William Black, is saying things that need to be heard. Someone in Washington has to take charge and deal with the criminals in the banking industry.
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/04032009/watch.html

A joint study from the conservative MacIver Institute and the anti public school Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice makes the claim that high school dropouts are a burden to taxpayers of Wisconsin. Fair enough. But the source and timing of the study raise some serious eyebrows.

Maybe pressure from the public kept Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce on the sidelines in the spring Supreme Court race. Perhaps a new progressive majority at the Capitol forced WMC to “reassess” its pro-corporate, anti-worker lobbying efforts.

Or maybe the corporate titans at WMC were just biding time, saving their money, energy and whatever modicum of influence they might have on what really matters: busting unions.

WMC has a long history of anti-worker, anti-union lobbying efforts – check out the good pro-worker legislation they opposed here, here, and here, just to give you a few. And WMC’s Issues Mobilization Council  has a history of running misleading and debunked ads.

Now, the WMC Issues Mobilization Council is out with a radio ad targeting Ron Kind for his support of workers and co-sponsorship of the Employee Free Choice Act. And once again, the ad is full of fear-mongering, false claims and scare-tactics. Here are some of the low-light from the WMC radio ad, and some of the FACTS about the Employee Free Choice Act.

Who Do You Think Will be the First WI State Leggie to Issue Anti-Iowa Press Release?

Nass?

Krusick?

Gundrum?

Lazich?

Suder?

Hubler?

Grothman?

Vukmir?

Fitzgerald (lil' or big)

Who?

Gonna be a battle to the bottom - vote in the comments.

My money's on big Fitzgerald, we'll see.

Paul Ryan is officially the poster boy for the Bush economic legacy tour.

Despite representing the three cities in Wisconsin with the highest unemployment rates, Ryan's stepped up front and center to offer a GOP budget plan that continues the worst of the Bush economic policies -- tax cuts for the rich, privatization and ignoring investment in American infrastructure.

GOP Seat-filler Kevin Petersen is cheesed. He's more than cheesed. He's a whole lotta angry.

He says veterans are getting shortchanged in the proposed state. The Waupaca state legie never had a thing to say about the endless shortfunding at the federal level under George Bush and the GOP-controlled Congress, but now he's in a fury.

Last Tuesday, I posted highlights from the public Yahoo group used by the right-wing, pro-voucher Advocates for Student Achievement in Milwaukee, ones that illustrated the sharp contrast between ASA's carefully-staged public profile and its real activities and intentions. For example, it purported to be, in its own words, a "good government group" organized to encourage more people to run for the Milwaukee Public Schools Board. But their internal communications showed that ASA was, in fact, a machine to recruit, train and manage pro-voucher candidates for that board, and to discourage others from running. In public, ASA said its only intent was to identify and inform good candidates; in private, ASA engaged in everything from fundraising to message-management for its stable of three: Redonna Rodgers, Annie Woodward and David Voeltner. And while in public, ASA's representatives said they had no agenda except to focus attention on improving Milwaukee's public schools, their internal conversations reveal a very different goal: to remove MPS Board President Peter Blewett from office.

NEWS FLASH: The secret-but-public Yahoo group that I described yesterday here has now been closed! Apparently too many Kossacks were checking the link, recognizing the evidence of potential criminal wrongdoing by Advocates for Student Achievement of Milwaukee, and sharing it with their friends and neighbors, the media and Wisconsin law enforcement agencies. I hope that everyone was able to copy the data found there before it was closed this morning. I did!

Now, on to today's update:

Kossacks, I've been thinking this morning about the reasons why the daily newspaper in Milwaukee might choose not to follow up on the investigative reporting (consisting of a couple of Google searches) I did on Monday and reported yesterday here and here.

One Wisconsin Now released the following statement from Executive Director Scot Ross regarding the finally-has-some-numbers House Republican Budget plan that cuts tax rates for the wealthiest Americans (like Paul Ryan) by another 30% and the fact that Ryan's budget has utterly no chance to pass given his current status in the minority.

"Whew."