The Necropolitan Sentinel

[Image taken from Paper Sparrow]

As you may have noticed, I’ve been a little preoccupied with serial bomber Brett Kimberlin’s latest sociopathic outbursts, to the neglect of other reporting duties (Jimmie Bise can catch you up on that, or Stacy can). I’ve had tons of browser tabs open for a few days, and a number of them have to do with Wisconsin, so I’m going to get rid of them in no particular order by dealing with them here and now.

Last night, a poll showed Scott Walker with an 8% lead over opponent Tom Barrett. That, according to CAC at Ace of Spades HQ, makes 7 polls in a row in which the Governor appears poised to win the recall battle. Many years ago, Tammy Baldwin won a recall vote because the representative of her district had changed his vote to become the deciding lawmaker on replacing the Brewers’ County Stadium with Miller Park. With exquisite timing, Tom Barrett has come out in favor of building the Milwaukee Bucks a new venue.

[Correction from The Trog:

Dan, minor point, but it was Kim Plache who won that recall election over Miller Park, not Tammy Baldwin. Plache later lost to Kathy Stepp, who didn't run again, which cleared the way for John Lehman to win the seat back for the Dems, but who was then beaten in 2010 by Van Wanggaard, who is now being recalled himself.

That'll teach me to rely too much on my muddled memory.]

Speaking before 200 people at a Milwaukee Press Club luncheon, Barrett’s readiness to build a taxpayer-funded arena for the Bucks distinguishes him from Gov. Scott Walker, Barrett’s Republican opponent in the June 5 recall.

The City of Milwaukee was plagued last summer by random flash-mob beatings of white folk attending the State Fair, festivals, and other public gatherings, and now Jim Geraghty reports this:

Today the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel unveils a special report, revealing that the Milwaukee Police Department has been misreporting and misclassifying violent crimes — hundreds of beatings, stabbings and child abuse cases — resulting in public summaries that claim violent crime is decreasing in the city… when the numbers are actually increasing modestly.

It’s pretty horrifying . . . .

Read the whole thing. The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel also raised a lot of eyebrows when it actually went so far as to endorse Scott Walker, stating that his recall was unwarranted.

There has been a lot of to-ing and fro-ing over whether Walker’s policies have helped to create jobs, as I noted last week, but apart from the row over the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ numbers, there have been other outrageous claims made in support of Walker’s policies, including this:

While a lightning rod for controversy and recall, Wisconsin’s Act 10 has paid significant dividends to taxpayers, according to a new analysis by the Beacon Hill Institute for Public Policy Research, at Suffolk University in Boston.

Act 10, which curbed collective bargaining for most unionized public employees, in the whole has saved taxpayers more than $1 billion, according to The Economic Impacts of the Wisconsin Budget Repair Act. The study is slated for release this week by Beacon Hill Institute, a prominent free market think tank.

What the analysis found is that without the law, which in part requires covered public employees to contribute more to their benefits and holds wage increases to the rate of inflation, Badger State governments would have been forced to raise taxes or make deep job cuts to meet budget expenses.

As it was, Gov. Scott Walker and the Republican-controlled Legislature pushed through reforms and reductions that filled a $3.6 billion budget shortfall, although organized labor asserts Republicans balanced the budget on the backs of public employees.

Labor unions have pitched an enormous fit over their the clipping of their privileges under the old Wisconsin Progressive model, but it’s incontrovertible that they brought it on themselves by demonstrating over decades that they simply were not honest or responsible enough to handle those privileges. Now, they’ve been taken away, and they weep, weep for themselves after having abused taxpayers all those years, selfishly, brazenly, calculatedly, insufferably, outrageously, corruptly, and with malice.

The long-shot hope of Democrats and Progressives was that a politically motivated investigation into Walker’s staff and key supporters at the time he was Milwaukee County Exec would provide materials for a scandal that would swallow his administration up, or at least create enough color of suspicion that he would be crippled by it.

The prosecutor is on the defense.

An investigator in the Milwaukee County’s District Attorney’s Office who is part of a John Doe investigation involving Gov. Scott Walker’s former aides is within his rights to display a political sign in his yard.

Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm released a tersely worded statement Monday in defense of David Budde, his chief investigator into a John Doe probe involving Gov. Scott Walker’s former aides.

The district attorney responded to a Media Trackers report earlier in the day that Budde had a “Recall Walker” sign in the front yard of his home.

Media Trackers, a Milwaukee-area conservative watchdog organization, also reported Budde’s home has a pro-labor “blue fist” poster on the front door.

Chisholm said he spoke with his chief investigator and Budde confirmed that his wife, an employee with Milwaukee County, placed the recall sign in the front yard of the home about a week ago.

He did not mention anything about the blue fist.

Hilariously but sadly, many of Walker’s critics in these regards have insisted that the Governor must be not only above such conflicts of interest, but above the appearance of them. And this is not the only time Wisconsin Dems have seen themselves hoisted by their own petards, since we have already seen a scandal over local Gannett journalists signing the recall petitions, as well as people in Chisholm’s office and a variety of state and local judges liable to be called upon to deliver verdicts on the issues. Not to mention 20,000 felons. Much of Chisholm’s investigation focused on whether some of Walker’s employees, when he was County Exec, used government computers on taxpayer time to engage in campaign-related activities, such as comment spamming at Walker-critical blogs, and now this comes out:

A Media Trackers open records request revealed that Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett’s wife, Kris Barrett, who taught at Dover Elementary used her Milwaukee Public School email account to twice lobby Democratic lawmakers and a third time to recruit fellow teachers to campaign against County Executive candidate Jeff Stone. The use of a taxpayer funded email account for such political purposes is a gross misuse of resources and forbidden by the Milwaukee Public Schools Employee Code of Ethics as well as the MPS Staff Acceptable Use Policy.

As a result of such repetitive stupidities and Barrett’s eroding support, the DNC has decided not to throw more money at Wisconsin, leaving the unions, whose candidate lost to Barrett, to support the man whom they vilified in the primary run-up, because they preferred Kathleen “In Pocket” Falk. That’s not to say that the unions and other deep pockets as well as various Democrat-Socialist political action orgs and PACs aren’t going to do everything in their power to try to get rid of Walker, by any means necessary; it just means that they’re going to have to rely on all those university student dupes, which will likely spawn more hilarity, as good Cheeseheads who just want to be left the hell alone throw them off of their lawns.

UPDATE: Democrat Governors willing to throw $1 million into anti-Walker ads.

They can still create mischief, though:

A task force that was investigating possible voter fraud in Milwaukee released its findings Tuesday.

U.S. Attorney Steven Biskupic said investigators found more than 4,500 ballots were cast in Milwaukee than registered voters in the Nov. 2 election.

But he said they have not found any pattern of conspiracy to commit fraud.

Investigators also found more than 100 instances of suspected double-voting and more than 200 felons who voted improperly.

No one has been charged, but the investigation continues.

While the votes from Wisconsin’s gubernatorial primaries were being tabulated, I had a front-row seat on Twitter to watch all the Recallistas flip out about the returns from red counties, with dark insinuations of voter fraud, but I haven’t heard a thing from the same people about Milwaukee’s better-than-100% turnout in November.

It was a running gag at Protein Wisdom that after many years of sheer viciousness toward Bush the Younger, Democrats suddenly wanted to push the reset button in the run-up to the 2008 election and call for peace, harmony, and civility. Now that they’ve opened Pandora’s Big Box of Recall, Democrat incumbents are getting pretty concerned that that option might be liable to abuse, much the same way Obama supporters are all about Obama’s inflation of Presidential powers and abuses of the checks and balances provided in the Constitution. When Obama loses, their deep and abiding concern will suddenly become vocal.

Asswipes.

Speaking of which, I give you Senator Patrik Leahy:

Sekulow hits all the important points about this outlandish demagoguery, so I’m just going to point out that one of the premier supporters of an enormously failed ideology is claiming to have an Olympian perspective over the historical arc of John Roberts’ shepherding of the Supreme Court.

I hathe lotht my teeth in your thervithe! Legathy! Legathy! It’s as though he was channeling the fat, sodden ghost of Ted Kennedy. At least Bernie Sanders is an avowed socialist.

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