Signature of lawmaker’s dead father on recall papers
By Daniel Bice of the Journal Sentinel

Bill Pocan – father of state Rep. Mark Pocan – may have died long ago.

But that doesn’t mean he can’t sign the recall petition against state Sen. Bob Wirch of Kenosha.

Just check page 362 of the Wirch recall petition, and you will find the signature and address for Bill Pocan, also the father of Milwaukee County Judge William Pocan. The petition says Bill Pocan penned his support of the recall effort on March 3.

Read more.

As Brad notes here, the GOP’s relentless propaganda charge of “Democratic voter fraud”
rings kinda hollow, since it’s Republicans who keep on getting caught committing
voter fraud (and voter registration fraud),

MCM

Indiana’s GOP Governor Will NOT Get to Appoint a Replacement
for GOP SoS Charged With Voter Fraud
by Brad Friedman

Indiana’s Republican Governor Mitch Daniels will not be able to appoint a replacement for the recently
elected Secretary of State Charlie White, who is currently under indictment for seven felony counts, three
of them — ironically enough for the state’s chief election official — for voter fraud.

Read more.

How Goldman Sachs Created the Food Crisis
Don’t blame American appetites, rising oil prices, or genetically modified crops for rising food prices. Wall Street’s at fault for the spiraling cost of food.
BY FREDERICK KAUFMAN | APRIL 27, 2011

Demand and supply certainly matter. But there’s another reason why food across the world has become so expensive: Wall Street greed.
It took the brilliant minds of Goldman Sachs to realize the simple truth that nothing is more valuable than our daily bread. And where there’s value, there’s money to be made. In 1991, Goldman bankers, led by their prescient president Gary Cohn, came up with a new kind of investment product, a derivative that tracked 24 raw materials, from precious metals and energy to coffee, cocoa, cattle, corn, hogs, soy, and wheat. They weighted the investment value of each element, blended and commingled the parts into sums, then reduced what had been a complicated collection of real things into a mathematical formula that could be expressed as a single manifestation, to be known henceforth as the Goldman Sachs Commodity Index (GSCI).

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If that newspaper would now stop denying that election fraud is just as grave a threat to our “democracy” as vote suppression, we’d be on our way toward setting up a voting system that is not a big bad joke, which has the likes of Koch and Rove all laughing at the rest of us,

MCM

The Republican Threat to Voting

Less than a year before the 2012 presidential voting begins, Republican legislatures and governors across the country are rewriting voting laws to make it much harder for the young, the poor and African-Americans – groups that typically vote Democratic – to cast a ballot.

Spreading fear of a nonexistent flood of voter fraud, they are demanding that citizens be required to show a government-issued identification before they are allowed to vote.

Republicans have been pushing these changes for years, but now more than two-thirds of the states have adopted or are considering such laws. The Advancement Project, an advocacy group of civil rights lawyers, correctly describes the push as “the largest legislative effort to scale back voting rights in a century.”

Read more.

Break the Silence in the UAE
By Hannah Gurman

As democratic uprisings have spread across the Middle East in the Arab Spring, the U.S. response has been as notable for its silences as for its selective words and deeds on behalf of the democracy movements in the region.

It took weeks of incessant protest in Tunisia and Egypt before the Obama administration was willing to say much or do anything to support the protesters. And while the United States intervened in Libya to protect civilians being killed by Gaddafi, it has responded to the uprisings in Bahrain and Iraq with a particular quiescence. The Obama administration has hardly said a peep about the need for democracy in Saudi Arabia or the other oil-rich states of the Gulf, even as the regimes of these regions are cracking down on the small but growing number of democracy activists in their midst.

Read more.

Shades of Huey Long—and other little Caesars even worse.

MCM

Walker cronyism places State Patrol Troopers under Fitzgerald in suspect situations
April 29, 2011
by bdgrdemocracy

There has been endless speculation and rumor since Scott Walker’s budget address and the security guarding the steam tunnel entrance to the Capitol. The “suits” seen in this video have been rumored to be private security – perhaps Wackenhut G4S …

Read more.

He “said it was possible”—indeed, “conceivable”—that he “stopped down to the governor’s office.” And if he was there, it “would have been to request gubernatorial mementoes for visiting international students.”

Well, sure! That’s actually a common thing, requesting gubernatorial mementoes for visiting international students. I’m not sure what a “gubernatorial memento” is, exactly, or why “international students” would be “visiting” Judge Prosser’s office, or, for that matter, what kind of “students” would be wanting such “mementoes” in the first place. (How old were they?)

And I also don’t get why the judge would have to “stop down to the governor’s office,” all by his lonesome, to pick up a selection of “mementos” for those kids who came from all those other countries just to meet him. (He doesn’t have a staff? Or what about the chaperones for all those children? Couldn’t one of them have “stopped down” for the “mementoes”?)

Still, there’s no doubt that the judge was doing right by all those “international students” who were “visiting” him (assuming it was him that they were “visiting”), when he “stopped down to the governor’s office” to get them some “gubernatorial mementoes.” They must have been small objects, like, say, gubernatorial keychains, or gubernatorial snow globes, or gubernatorial kazoos, or they would have been too big to fit into the shopping bag or shoe box that Judge Prosser used to carry them away, since he had no staffer with him.

Small as they were, though, it’s the thought that counts. So, even though Judge Prosser didn’t have the pleasure of encountering Scott Walker in Scott Walker’s office on the day after Election Day, he sure did the right thing when he stopped down there.

MCM

Prosser: No meeting with governor, but possibly at office

In an interview with WKOW27 News, state supreme court justice David Prosser denied meeting with Governor Walker the day after voters decided between Prosser and challenger JoAnne Kloppenburg in a hotly-contested race, but said it was possible he was at the governor’s office.

“It is conceivable that during that week, I stopped down to the governor’s office,” Prosser told WKOW27 News.

Prosser told WKOW27 News any visit would have been to request gubernatorial mementoes for visiting international students.

Read more.

I just reviewed the items I sent out and posted at the time, and found that, sure enough, one came from the sort of far-right source nailed by Mark Ames and Yasha Levine on AlterNet. (We took it down.) They’ve done us all a major democratic service by explaining how the right exploited that hot issue as a way to keep TSA workers from unionizing.

MCM

Media Fell for Right-Wing PR in Orchestrated Outrage Against TSA Workers Who Were Seeking Union Rights

Published on AlterNet on April 28th, journalists Mark Ames and Yasha Levine provide a detailed, blow-by-blow deconstruction of how the right-wing spin machine was able to focus enormous media attention on the TSA, effectively scapegoating the 50,000 TSA workers who were simply following orders from their superiors. The media, as well as conservatives and liberals, got sucked into the hype.

The propaganda began with the Drudge Report’s hysterical portrayal of John Tyner, who refused a pat-down, telling TSA agents last November, “You touch my junk and I’m going to have you arrested.” There were waves of right wing PR, many by individuals and groups for whom civil liberties were never a priority. Included in the array of anti-TSA campaigns was an “alliance of rabid Christian homophobes and neo-Confederates, warmongering neocons and notorious anti-union lobbying outfits, and even a few blasts-from-the-right-wing-past, like the Rutherford Institute’s John Whitehead, a onetime Christian ‘reconstructionist’ who all but disappeared after running Paula Jones’ sexual-harassment lawsuit against Bill Clinton in the 1990s. Whitehead, whose outfit once advocated the death penalty for homosexuals, recently re-emerged in the public eye, leading several high-profile lawsuits against the TSA.

The giant hype reached its hot-air filled moment when the media expected chaos and protests at the airports as travelers were headed out for their Thanksgiving weekends with their families. But what happened? Nothing. The hot air all came out of the hype, and with it the evidence was there to show that the media and the spectators had all been taken for another ride… but no one has reported it, until now.

Read more.

RECOUNT ALERT! SERIOUS BREAK IN CHAIN OF CUSTODY IN WAUKESHA COUNTY!
CITIZEN JOURNALIST

Breaking News Out of Waukesha County Wisconsin — This being reported from witnesses on the ground in Waukesha

“At around 2:15pm, we were ready to open the bags for Delafield. There were three bags total. Bags 1 & 2 were fine. The numbers all matched up. When we got to bag 3, we found out that the bag # was NOT RECORDED ON THE INSPECTOR’S statement…! The Republican canvass person said we could assume that the clerk forgot to write the # down on the inspector’s statement and we could proceed. Of course, this is a break in the chain of custody!…”

So Bill (volunteer lawyer) objected. I got my phone out and went to call the campaign. The sheriff wouldn’t let me out the back door (even though I went out that door to use the restroom earlier) but made me go around everyone to the front door (front door is for reps, back door is for public). I had to get past the guy sitting out front wanting to know if I was leaving for the day, what my name was…

Read more.