Alberta Darling's deliberate indifference to suffering

On Friday the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed a 2010 decision of Federal District Court Judge Charles Clevert of the Eastern District of Wisconsin, which found Wis. Stat. § 302.386(5m) to be a violation of the U.S. Constitution's prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.

The statute banned State funding of therapy for Wisconsin prisoners medically diagnosed with Gender Identity Disorder. One of the cosponsors of the original bill banning the treatment (2005 Wisconsin Act 105) was Alberta Darling, the conservative Republican Wisconsin State Senator who faces a highly contentious recall election tomorrow.

Undecided voters — reportedly there are a few out there — take heed.

Darling was joined in this Act of compassionate conservatism by her counterparts Luther Olsen and Robert Cowles, two other Senators who tomorrow face similar fates. Another was our friend Scott Fitzgerald.

The unanimous Seventh Circuit panel was likewise unequivocal.

In affirming the district court, the three panelists wrote that Wisconsin Department of Corrections officials "acted with deliberate indifference in that [the officials] knew of the serious medical need but refused to provide hormone therapy because of Act 105" despite the inmates' "suffer[ing]," which is known to include "severe physical effects such as muscle wasting, high blood pressure, and neurological complications."

At the time Alberta Darling and her conservative Republican colleagues cosponsored the bill, they knew of exactly two inmates among a population of thousands, upon whom the Wisconsin DOC had expended "approximately $2,300 on hormone therapy." Indeed, at trial before the district court in Milwaukee, the DOC testified that "the cost of providing hormone therapy is between $300 and $1,000 per inmate per year."

Meanwhile Scott Fitzgerald can blow twenty-seven grand in a few days.

Additionally, wrote the Seventh Circuit, "[t]he district court concluded that DOC might actually incur greater costs by refusing to provide hormones, since inmates with [Gender Identity Disorder] might require other expensive treatments or enhanced monitoring by prison security."

Thus does this case put the lie not only to so-called compassionate conservatism — "deliberate indifference to serious medical need" — it moreover blows from the water Darling et al's alleged commitment to "fiscal conservatism." Then there are the costs of the appeal, obviously, and another potential appeal to the Seventh Circuit sitting en banc.

Behold your Kulturkampf, citizens, waged by conservative Republicans like Alberta Darling and the other original sponsors of the bill, who also included the usual suspects like Glenn Grothman and several other of our self-advertised Soldiers of Christ. As has been mentioned before at this space, gender — like sexual orientation, in fact — exists on a continuum.

It's a function of the "intelligent design" the culture warriors claim their Creator has imposed on "his" Creation, which Creator's gender and orientation apparently being less indeterminate than these patients'.

The supernatural is more familiar to them than the observable reality.

Here is the Seventh Circuit's decision: Fields v. Smith. Read the whole thing; it's only 19 pages. And pay particular attention to the medical testimony. Personally I don't care whether or not these folks are prison inmates, which is most evidently the status that raised the intuitive ire of our brave Republican lawgivers. That Alberta Darling and her pals in the Wisconsin legislature literally forced the denial of medical treatment to legitimate sufferers is a disgrace, but especially because of this here:

The [DOC] doctors testified that they could think of no other state law or policy, besides Act 105, that prohibits prison doctors from providing inmates with medically necessary treatment.

Only in Wisconsin, and thanks to State Senator Alberta Darling.

You can help return her to her secluded River Hills mansion tomorrow.

Alberta Darling: Wrong on the boner pills

Electile dysfunction.

Chris Liebenthal is documenting Alberta Darling's bad week(s):

Wisconsin Senate Republican Alberta Darling "misspoke" regarding the timing of her departure from the Board of Directors of Planned Parenthood. Darling had claimed she left the board before she was elected to the State Assembly in 1990. Turns out that she was there for a full five years after being elected.

D'oh!

And it must be noted again that the WISGOP is so desperate to hang on to Alberta Darling's 8th District Senate seat that it's shifted all of its southern liberal enclaves into an adjacent district, where Senator Lena Taylor presides over a Democratic lock, and pushed its northern borders further deeper into Glenn Grothman-land. That is, if Democratic challenger Rep. Sandy Pasch topples Alberta Darling on Tuesday, it will be exceedingly difficult for Pasch to defend her incumbency in 2012.

Furthermore it wouldn't surprise me in the least — and I have heard this concern voiced by more than a couple of voters — if the WISGOP means to discourage electoral participation by those southernmost Democrats because if Pasch does win on Tuesday, she won't even be those voters' representative in the Senate once the redistricting plan takes effect.

The WISGOP being nothing if not endlessly devious and power-Viagra'd.

It would be just one additional WISGOP voter suppression technique.

Oh my, (Alberta) Darling

"$250K and above. Those aren't wealthy people." — Alberta Darling

Asked to name a single company that added a single job in her district, Alberta Darling (R-River Hills) was unable to produce even one company that created jobs as a result of her policies.

Who the heck in River Hills needs a job anyway.

h/t Xoff.

eta: Video.

Obviously not everybody is wandering around with statistics at their immediate behest, but this "job creation" business is at the heart of the Walker regime's policy claims and justifications. So those statistics should be to Darling's immediate hand. And not just "jobs created," but testimonials from those "job creators" as to how they were "created" by direct attribution to the Walker regime's policies. In fact I have never heard any such thing anywhere from any of them. Where might such testimonials be found? Like, "I created this job because of Scott Walker's tort reforms," or words to that effect. Walker made that claim this morning, again, on Fox & Friends. Which is why Walker goes on Fox & Friends, because none of those dupes is going to make him prove it.

And: Amusing clip of Alberta Darling accusing other people of lying.

Wisconsin Democrats go heavy after Alberta Darling

Update: Here's the DPW's complaint against Alberta Darling et al.

Wisconsin State Senator and object of one of next Tuesday's recall elections Alberta Darling has committed multiple felonies, misled the public, and intentionally covered up her crimes, according to State Democratic chairman Mike Tate. Tate said the Democratic Party was submitting complaints containing specific allegations with the district attorneys of Milwaukee and Dane Counties, along with federal investigators in both the Eastern and Western Districts of Wisconsin.

Apparently some of the the allegations arise from revelations contained among the fruits of the liberal advocacy group One Wisconsin Now's June 8 open records request to Darling, which she had been resisting until OWN filed suit in a Dane County court on Tuesday. The records contain correspondence between Darling and the American Federation for Children, a conservative proponent of private voucher schools to whose benefit OWN claims Sen. Darling has been working to tailor legislation.

Should be a fun next few days.

Coincidentally, today also marks the opening of the Wisconsin State Fair.

So we get a fair and a circus.* Woohoo!

* And the hot bats.

We could lose Alberta Darling, wherever she is

Hilarious.

Sounds like Republican Sen. Dan "Stone Chip" Kapanke's lost her already.

I was by the Alberta Darling HQ in Glendale the other day, where tables were laid with supplies for volunteers (clipboards, etc.) in Sendik's bags. I have nothing against Sendik's, which is a local chain of high-end grocery stores, but those bags are usually full of foie gras and imported cheese.

So the next time you hear "liberal elites," you may point and laugh.

By the way, Alberta Darling was on Charlie Sykes's Sunday morning teevee show a couple of weeks ago (guest host: Jeff Wagner) and said that concerns over restricting the First Amendment right to vote were simply "much ado about nothing." The First Amendment is "nothing."

Republican Sen. Alberta Darling actually said that. She did.

Seriously.

Rich guy sure loves him some Scott Walker

Maybe a little too much.

And, these tidbits, via Dispatches From Fitzwalkerstan:

Take a look at Mr. White’s twitter feed to catch a glimpse into the life of this contributor.

Cocktails in Mequon 2nite, golf tourny w/dinner 2morrow, wedding Sat, Phnx to see Sara Rose, Brett & Cheri Sun am, Milw Weds midnite. Whew!

Home alone for Village meeting tonight. Back to CO and mountains 7AM tomorrow.

Surfing financial web pages from office

Mr. White owns the Rite Hite Corporation.

Which makes him our friend Rick Esenberg's old boss. Small world aina?

Clearly, there's gold in them thar River Hills:

Alberta Darling (R-River Hills) raised $30,000 this year from a single contributor.

Republicans received unlimited donations while writing budget

That would be the budget that rewards the rich and burdens the poor.

Meanwhile Democrats have to work hundreds of contributors to equal what two or three wealthy individuals donate to Republican candidates.

Tells you something, don't it. Compare Alberta Darling's few big money contributors with failed Republican candidate for Senate John Nygren's ability to round up a grand total of 398 signatures, two short of what's required. John Nygren's failure paved the way for Republican David VanderLeest, who seems a wee bit off-kilter to say the least, to ensure the continuing incumbency of Democratic State Senator Dave Hansen.

Arrest these six Wisconsin Republicans today

1. arrest v. — seize someone and take them into custody
2. arrest v. — stop or delay progress or a process

On March 3, 2011, these six Wisconsin State Senators, Robert Cowles, Alberta Darling, Sheila Harsdorf, Luther Olsen, Randy Hopper, and Dan Kapanke, endorsed a resolution by their legislative leader, Scott Fitzgerald, to issue arrest warrants, in the sense of definition 1. above, for 14 of their political rivals. They did so on the flimsiest of alleged legal bases, and in fact on legal bases manufactured from the deliberate misreading of an adverse decision issued by an Oconto County court.

And amazingly, they did this not in the Soviet Union but in America.

Today, many Wisconsin voters have the opportunity to arrest the six named Republican Senators, not according to the lawless means by which those Senators acted, but in the sense of definition 2. above, to impede the progress of a radical Republican agenda in which all three branches of State government — including the highest court — are complicit.

Also in March, Republican legislators broke the law — and admitted they broke the law — by convening a twilight gathering in clear violation of the State's open meetings statutes, which give effect to the Wisconsin constitution's guarantee of public access to government proceedings.

On June 14, in perhaps the most radical act of the current regime, the State Supreme Court, by a bare majority of Republican judges and in an unsigned, unexplained order, invented a novel form of judicial authority through which they blessed the illegal acts of the Republican legislators.

Some, including the editorial board of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, the State's biggest newspaper, have complained that today's elections misuse and betray the spirit of the people's constitutional power to recall their elected representatives. They complain that the constitutional recall mechanism should be reserved for more serious misdeeds in office, not just for disagreements with those representatives' policies.

But Wisconsin voters have to wonder, what more serious misdeeds of office can there be than ordering State law enforcement officials to arrest their political rivals? What more serious misdeeds of office can there be than violating a collection of statutes intended to guarantee the people of Wisconsin merely the barest access to the deliberations of their government? What more serious misdeeds of office can there be than cheering on a court to fabricate its own unprecedented authority?

I can think of none. Arrest them. Or else just arrest any three of them.

See also: Alberta Darling's deliberate indifference to suffering

Interlude

The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel gets selective

The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel's editorial board mandarins have seen fit to denounce Democratic candidate for Senate Sandy Pasch's failure to have her name removed from a third-party outfit's website, where she is listed among its board of directors. The third-party group is active in campaigning against Pasch's political rival, the incumbent Republican Alberta Darling, and coordination between candidates and third-party outfits is unlawful. The Journal-Sentinel's concern was apparently raised by complaints filed with the Wisconsin Government Accountability Board by the State Republican Party. However the complaints do nothing more than note the appearance of Pasch's name on the third-party's website.

Those complaints present no evidence whatsoever of any coordination between Pasch's campaign and the third-party, yet they don't hesitate in directly accusing Pasch of breaking the law. In fact the two complaints, filed on Monday and Tuesday respectively, are sterling examples of piling inference upon inference upon innuendo to reach their fallacious conclusions. Yes, obviously Sandy Pasch's name on the website looks bad.

But that isn't evidence of anything other than a name on a website.

Meanwhile the Koch front group Americans For Prosperity sent mailers to liberal Democratic voters advising them to be sure and get their absentee ballots in by two days after the August 9 elections, but the Journal-Sentinel has not been so moved to condemn that sleazy ploy.*

And Alberta Darling has been ignoring the left/liberal advocacy group One Wisconsin Now's open records requests for months, whereas the Wisconsin statutes command ORR recipients to respond "without delay." OWN filed an actual complaint, in court, containing substantive allegations, as compared with the WISGOP complaints to the GAB, whose allegations are groundless. Yet the MJS mandarins decide the first of these three situations is what merits their finger-wagging treatment.

Our librul media and the choices it makes, I guess is what that is.

* The MJS happily publishes AFP's op-ed pieces, however.

Why Wisconsin Right to Life was not charged

Further to yesterday's blargh entry, "Bribes" are a wash.

To recap, here's the operative portion of WRtL's email:

The Wisconsin Right to Life and Family Action coalition is offering rewards for volunteers who make an impact over the weekend by educating and encouraging family and friends to vote by absentee ballot. Here are the rewards: $25 Gift Card for any volunteer who can get at least 15 pro-life/pro-family voters to complete an Absentee Ballot Application dated by Tuesday, July 5th.

This is the assistant district attorney's own condensation of the statute:

(1m) Any person who does any of the following violates this chapter:

(a) Offers [or] gives ... anything of value ... to ... any elector, or to ... any other person, in order to induce any elector to ...[v]ote or refrain from voting.

Offer or give. Give or offer. That is, whether the thing of value is given or offered, each action is equally violative of the statute. It is not more violative to give than to offer, nor is it worse to offer than to give.

Yesterday ADA Landgraf decided that it is worse to give than to offer.

Moreover, he decided that it is worse to request than to offer, even though the statute says absolutely nothing about any requesting. And in the course of deciding so, he characterized the statute as follows: "The 'thing of value' need only induce the elector to vote." Italics are his.

Except that is not at all what the statute says. The inducement — or "encouragement," if you will — obtains from the any other person who is offered the thing of value. Contra the ADA's reading, it is not the "thing of value" that provides the inducement to vote; rather, it's the "any other person" who was offered the thing of value who performs the inducement to vote. The latter action is WRtL's "encouragement."

Any person offers a thing of value to any other person, who in turn "induces" an elector to vote. There are three parties in the statute.

I continue to see no way to deny that and it should probably be fixed.

Notably, part of Mr. Landgraf's analysis involves postulating a set of hypotheticals that are very much unlike the circumstances before him. For example he imagines a rally featuring "a national recording artist who would otherwise perform only for persons paying far in excess of a $1 admission fee." That's entirely unlike WRtL's offer, to coin a phrase.

But on the other hand Landgraf concludes that, "fact patterns that are not entirely unlike those presented here may well violate the Election Bribery statute, even if Absentee Balloting is involved." So why not charge WRtL? Throughout Landgraf's analysis, he denotes both what he perceives as the lack of clear guidance in the language of the statute itself and the fact that "no judicial opinions offer guidance to help answer" the question, "What does it mean to induce an elector to vote?"

So should there be a judicial opinion, or will the ADA's opinion suffice?

I expect there will eventually be a judicial opinion, just not today.

I will note that Black's Law Dictionary, 7th ed., defines inducement as "enticing or persuading another person to take a certain course of action." The word WRtL uses is "encourage." The Pocket OAD, 2nd ed., defines induce as "persuade or influence someone to do something."

Encourage means "give support, confidence, or hope to someone," or "help an activity, belief, etc., to develop." That's not "inducement"?

Additionally, the Milwaukee County district attorney's investigation unearthed a trove of correspondence among WRtL, its partner Wisconsin Family Action, and those groups' "family and friends," detailing the two outfits' objectives. Not only were those outfits' efforts directed at inducing voting, and not only were they directed at inducing voting for sympathetic candidates, they were directed at inducing voting for a specific, named candidate: Republican Senator Alberta Darling.

The longer view takes into consideration the fact that ADA Landgraf had two separate cases on his hands: the one involving WRtL and another involving Wisconsin Jobs Now, which was organizing van rides for prospective voters to City Hall at the starting point to which there was available "refreshments" ("barbeque") if one wanted them. In the latter case Landgraf acknowledged — through testimony provided by, of all people, Media Trackers, which had previously accused Wisconsin Jobs Now of "multiple violations of election law" — there were none of the connections between the three parties contemplated by the statute.

The ADA also makes much of the fact that Wisconsin Jobs Now is aligned with Democratic interests, while Wisconsin Right to Life is aligned with Republican interests (specifically, its interests in incumbent Republican Senator Alberta Darling). Whereas the ADA finds not only no connection between WJN and any specific candidate, he finds no connection between WJN and any specific political party. And whereas WRtL admits its connection to and support of a specific candidate, despite a depiction of its activities as "issue ad[vertising]" which, in another area of election law, is by definition the antithesis of named-candidate advertising.

Landgraf also emphasizes the fact that each of the legal memoranda he solicited from both Wisconsin Right to Life and Wisconsin Jobs Now tended to exonerate from prosecution the activities of the other.

In short the sense conveyed by ADA Landgraf's letter to the circuit court judge is that this escapade, as a whole, is a wash. Offsetting penalties, by the gridiron analogy. Personally I still find the "barbeque" and the "gift cards" circumstances very much distinguishable as applied to the plain terms of the election bribery statute. Mr. Landgraf admits as much but eschews a "common sense" approach in favor of, among other relatively nebulous and extra-textual concepts, his hypothetical situations.

The ADA wasn't wrong — arguably his conclusion not to prosecute isn't unreasonable nor an abuse of his discretion — and it clearly was not an easy decision to arrive at. I reckon that but not for the "barbeque," WRtL would have gotten served a criminal complaint. So thanks to the heroes at Media Trackers — whose own testimony proved that its own accusations were complete bullshit — and the MacGyvers, who seemingly induced the Media Trackers "barbeque" witness* after another Media Trackers principal "refused to cooperate" with the DA's investigation.

In brief: Legal bullet dodged, because politics. They are often difficult to extricate from one another, there remains little question about that.

* Who testified he never even saw, let alone ate, any barbeque. Indeed, Mr. Landgraf's report is worth reading as much for its legal commentary as for its objective portrayal of Media Trackers' pathetic dishonesty.

In re Randy Hopper: Only 15,268 signatures to go

Recall organizers having reportedly obtained the support of the State Senator's estranged wife: Via Mal Contends and Blogging Blue.

Little of the above appears to have been confirmed by more traditional means, but it is true that Randy Hopper, Republican of Fond Du Lac, is embroiled in divorce proceedings and headed for trial, and it is true that Persuasion Partners Inc. scrubbed Sen. Hopper's alleged Madison girlfriend from its website yesterday.

Domestic arrangements substantially similar to marriage neither valid nor recognized in this State.

— Shorter Wis. Const., J. Appling, ed.

Persuasion Partners is a Republican PR/lobbying outfit operated by Darrin Schmitz,* famed orchestrator of the notorious Mike Gableman for Wisconsin Supreme Court campaign of 2007/08. Schmitz helped Gableman get formally charged with ethics violations, a case that dragged on for many months and the charges remain pending against Gableman: the State Supreme Court split 3-3 on its disposition, with Justice David Prosser, who himself stands for reelection on April 5, holding in sympathy with Gableman's aggressive rationalizations.

Hopper is believed to be the most vulnerable of the eight Republican State Senators against whom recall efforts are underway. If organizers can topple three of them then Democrats might regain control of the 33-member body. The others would most likely be the 8th Senate district's Alberta Darling and the 32nd's Dan Kapanke.

Sen. Darling's constituency presents an interesting challenge, as it straddles the affluent and increasingly liberal northern lakeshore Milwaukee County suburbs and the three most defiantly conservative counties in the State: Ozaukee, Washington, and Waukesha.

Sen. Kapanke's district spreads over five counties along the State's western border. Kapanke won the district in 2008 but narrowly lost the most populous (by far) of the five, La Crosse County. So the signature-gatherers know exactly where to concentrate their labors.

As for Randy Hopper, he should probably just resign.

* Schmitz calculated then-circuit court judge Gableman's rate of reversal on appeal by counting as cases thousands of uncontested traffic tickets, which Schmitz claimed Gableman had "presided over."

That a sly (or possibly clueless) partisan operator would pull such a risible stunt is unsurprising, but that a State judge with an advanced degree in law would let him get away with it is almost beyond belief.

Alberta Darling is the second most vulnerable

That's what Craig Gilbert's numbers show.

Racing stripe on a turd

I was only half-joking over a rationalization intended to present Sarah Palin as the "sole occupier in the field of lipstick imagery and metaphor," but apparently a local Republican politician is dead serious about it.

"Right now we think Sarah owns the name of lipstick," said a State Senator from the posh Milwaukee North Shore suburb of River Hills who owns the names of Alberta and Darling.

Meanwhile The View's Joy Behar and Barbara Walters forced John McCain to finally admit that when he described "putting lipstick on a pig," he wasn't talking about Senator Hillary Clinton, he was only making reference to her health care proposals.

No double standard there, nope. Not at all.

"Senator Obama chooses his words very carefully, okay? He shouldn't have said it," McCain admonished The View's hosts.

Actually it's McCain and his sleazy campaign managers who choose Obama's words carefully, exercises in cherry picking, quote mining, and deliberate distortion that would make a creationist blush.

Here's a round-up of McCain's most recent lies and falsehoods.

The Straight Talkin' McCain followed up his visit to The View with one to teevee chef Rachael Ray, who his own defenders have accused of supporting Palestinian terrorists.