Maintaining a political blog in Wisconsin

Is like banging your head against a [scuffed limestone] wall:

[Dane County Circuit Court Judge Maryann] Sumi argues that the state senate violated the open-meetings law by failing to provide 24 hours' notice of a legislative meeting — in this case, the conference committee meeting that forwarded the bill to the full senate. Yet, in her order, she doesn’t address the clear exemption to the rule provided in Senate Rule 93, which allows for no notice of proceedings for conference committee bills. The state statutes clearly give precedence to legislative rules in the case of conflict; Sumi simply believes no conflict exists, ignoring the fact that the bill was, in fact, a conference committee bill.

The rest is blargh blargh dirty hippies blargh union thugs blargh. This is in the National Review (which once upon a time preluded its founder's teevee chat show with the second Brandenburg: these days Old Bach is spinning in his crypt like Frank Luntz on methamphetamines) and its own rather less meticulous composer is the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute "senior fellow" Christian Schneider. WPRI is another outfit wrapped up with Journal Communications, Inc. The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel not infrequently features WPRI "policy research" as front page news (the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit is considerably less impressed), Christian Schneider is an oft-featured columnist, and Mike Nichols, another WPRI "senior fellow," is a regular columnist.

And Charlie Sykes, another of Journal Communications, Inc.'s marquee performer/clowns, edits WPRI's own magazine and so on and so forth.

They're every single one of them cuddled together in bed.

They also generally don't know what they're talking about and the above is a useful case in point. In fact Judge Sumi found that the defendants failed to give two hours notice of the meeting, whereas the statute is as clear as clear can be: "in no case may the notice be provided less than 2 hours in advance of the meeting." In. No. Case. Judicial conservatives, "strict constructionists," "plain meaning textualists," are you listening.

Hypocrite

Moreover the violation concerned the Republicans' selection of a tiny venue for the conference committee meeting, which served to disallow members of the public from attending, where larger accommodation was available. This the WPRI "senior fellow" Schneider simply ignores, despite its being among the crucial connections between the Open Meetings Law and the Wisconsin constitution at the heart of the action.

Schneider then hypocritically claims that Judge Sumi "doesn’t address the clear exemption to the rule provided in Senate Rule 93." Well of course she does, as this invalid argument was among the Fitzgeralds' defenses to the complaint. And there is no such "clear exemption" because Senate Rule 93 addresses the manner of notice required, and not the time of notice required. We've been through this months ago, after Ellen Nowak, chief of staff to the Waukesha County executive, had published at WisPolitics dot com her tissue of defamatory misrepresentations.

Judge Sumi doesn't "simply believe" no conflict exists: The unrebutted evidence that witnesses presented during the court's hearings demonstrated that no conflict exists. And the cherry on the backside of Schneider's remarkable cluelessness is his appeal to a Senate Rule for guidance on what he admits was a conference committee, for which Joint Rules of procedure exist, and which Judge Sumi also addressed.

Senior fellow: The law "allows for no notice." Pure b.s.

In short, WPRI's Schneider is hopeless, uninformed, and flat wrong.

Perfesser

Meanwhile in Journal Communications, Inc.'s daily organ the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, the equally addled Patrick McIlheran appeals to yet another Journal Communications, Inc. frequent columnist, Marquette's professor of #rwnj law Rick Esenberg,* to whom McIlheran laughably attributes a "most enlightening insight," linking to the prof's blog post.

McIlheran claims Esenberg "dismantled Sumi's understanding." Except Esenberg did no such thing and in fact repeats the travesty of law committed by the WaukCo. executive's chief of staff. And indeed if one follows the comments thread at Esenberg's blog you will discover your humble correspondent reiterating precisely the evidence and law which yesterday appeared as among the bases for Judge Sumi's decision, and which Esenberg either simply handwaves away or ignores completely.

And has never addressed, as far as I know. Because it's best to remain silent when you are wrong, I suppose, and allow your quasi-colleagues at Journal Communications, Inc. to wallow in their misunderstandings and present long-since-debunked "arguments" as alleged "journalism."

And, naturally, WPRI/Journal Communications, Inc.'s Charlie Sykes will repeat this complete nonsense once again this morning. We discussed similar situations at our panel event in Madison on May 12, and the Journal Communications, Inc. family is making us look like prophets.

Now maybe if we were to predict the Rapture, it will happen for sure and then all the JRNers will fly off to ... somewhere. It really is a joke.

* Esenberg is also trundled out as an expert "who has followed the case closely" in the Journal-Sentinel's straight news report of yesterday's decision. Did you know that he's the only lawyer in the State who has?

How Patrick McIlheran lies for the WISGOP

Perfect example right here:

One Dane County judge rules that collective bargaining reform is unacceptable ...

This is your Journal Communications, Inc. brand of journalism.

But as one Dane County judge very clearly explained, both the federal Constitution and the Wisconsin constitution confer the judicial power equally to both higher and lower courts.* And as one Dane County judge very clearly explained, her ruling was directed at "the March 9, 2011 action of the Legislature's Joint Committee of Conference" and not whether the Walker administration's policy was acceptable or not.

Journal Communications, Inc.'s Patrick McIlheran is flat-out lying.

On the other hand, the Wisconsin Department of Justice, which is "representing the Republicans," makes repeated explicit defenses of Republican political policy in its latest filing with the Supreme Court pursuant to its attempt to have that court legislate from the bench.

The DOJ, on behalf of Scott Walker's infamous building maintenance supervisor Mike Huebsch, has gone so far as to suggest that the one Dane County judge, Maryann Sumi, violated the State code of judicial ethics by responding to the DOJ's petition for a supervisory writ (it's not an appeal, as has been widely reported). Now that is remarkable.

The Supreme Court, which does indeed have superintending authority over the (lower) circuit courts, on May 4 ordered Judge Sumi to file a response to the Huebsch/DOJ petition. Yes, ordered. The DOJ suggests that Judge Sumi should have exercised her option not to respond. The Wisconsin Rules of Appellate Procedure, at Wis. Stat. § 809.51(2), allow that a respondent to a petition for supervisory writ "may file a letter stating that he or she does not intend to file a response."

In other words, a respondent is not exempt or excepted from the Supreme Court's order but may disobey an order of the Supreme Court. Respondents to petitions for a supervisory writ are not limited to "court[s] and the presiding judge[s]," but the petition may be filed against "other person[s] or bod[ies]." And clearly Judge Sumi is in a different position vis-à-vis the Supreme Court than other persons or bodies not courts and presiding judges. Yet the Wisconsin Department of Justice suggests she should have disobeyed the Supreme Court's order.

Obviously Judge Sumi did not disobey an order of the Supreme Court.

And for not disobeying the Supreme Court's order, the Department of Justice is now veiledly threatening to file a motion for recusal against Judge Sumi, despite the fact that the ultimate determination for Judge Sumi's disqualification from the case of Ozanne v. Fitzgerald resides with Judge Sumi, once again, according to the black letter State law.

So at this point the Department of Justice is merely throwing stuff against the wall to find out if any of it will stick, in the course of its "representation of the Republicans." Thus whose impartiality is under question here is pretty obvious. And it sure ain't Judge Sumi's.

All of which demonstrates at least three things: (1) the ideological zealotry of Deputy Attorney General Kevin St. John, (2) Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen's acquiescence to Mr. St. John getting on this breakaway, and (3) the WISGOP Republicans' abject terror at attempting to have their union-busting bill passed by a non-illegal procedure.

McIlheran's bald lie is put forth in service of advertising his appearance tomorrow morning on another Journal Communications, Inc. buffoon's teevee show, Charlie Sykes's Sunday Insight [sic], which runs on Journal Communications, Inc.'s teevee station, TMJ-4. And of course Sykes is also an employee of Journal Communications, Inc.'s radio station, WTMJ.

There you have it, Journal Communications, Inc.'s corpo-blanketing of Milwaukee media with conservative Republican talking points. Because I wouldn't expect a discussion of the Rules of Appellate Procedure among Charlie Sykes and his guests tomorrow, who also include one of the most absurd conservative Republican political hacks in Wisconsin, Brian Fraley.

Roughly as absurd as the political hacks at Journal Communications, Inc.

* Matter of fact the same principle was invoked here in defense of J.B. Van Hollen, which days of defending JBVH at this space are long gone.

Walker's big gummint democracy by the numbers

So lemme get this straight.

Milwaukee residents voted nearly 70% to enact an ordinance expanding sick leave provisions for employees, which survived conservative Republican legal challenges all the way to the State Supreme Court, and now Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, who swept into office on a Tea Partyish platform and believes government is too powerful, is exercising that power to void the plebiscite.

Our Fitz Van Walker regime really does detest workers, does it not.

Relative to the overhelmingness of a 70% majority — almost unheard of in American politics — Scott Walker won the executive mansion with 52% of the vote last November. More recently incumbent Justice David Prosser achieved a 00.48% (50.24% to 49.76%) margin over challenger JoAnne Kloppenburg, who posted substantial gains throughout the State in counties that went for Walker just months ago and for Prosser in the February Supreme Court primary.

This, or so we are told by certain representatives of Journal Communications, Inc. (JRN), the State's largest media conglomerate, was an enormous validation of Walker's policies. Incidentally Steven J. Smith, JRN's CEO, is a board member of the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce (MMAC), which filed suit* against the sick leave ordinance. The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, JRN's print organ, editorialized against the ordinance on several occasions without identifying this — you would think — pertinent fact.

Justice Prosser, sitting on an evenly divided court, sided with arch conservative Justices Roggensack and Gableman last October (Justice Ziegler — who is figuratively joined at the hips with Roggensack and Gableman — to the undoubted chagrin of the MMAC, sat it out) in seeking to continue a circuit court's injunction** against the ordinance, an injunction the District I Court of Appeals vacated.

In sum, a conservative Republican governor and Supreme Court justice, both installed in Madison on the slimmest of majorities, would sweep away the clear will of the people of Milwaukee with the aid of Journal Communications, Inc.'s various ink-stained*** wretches and radio shouters. And they say this is what democracy looks like.

Now it may be that the sick leave ordinance is a bad idea, that it penalizes employers, or that the vagaries of its text leave open the benefits to abuse by fallible human nature — what benefits aren't — but the numbers are clear, and they rank GOP hypocrisy near the top.

More from Paul Secunda, a professor of employment law at Marquette University, who explains the constitutional implications of Walker's latest decree to a non-Journal Communications, Inc. media outlet.

* JRN's Charlie Sykes Rule for Wis. Radicals: "Litigate everything."

** Yes, you read that correctly. There's been a lot of weeping and bellyaching from conservative Republicans pursuant to a similar situation arising from a Madison court, where a FitzWalker collective bargaining agreement bill is under a writ of injunction, but no such GOP tear was shed when the sick leave ordinance was so enjoined.

That is, those Republicans respect the rule of law only when it's convenient, which is to my mind the most resonant takeaway here.

*** Or E-ink-stained wretches, I guess they would be nowadays.

What do you know, but it was Patrick Roggensack!

Calumniates the justifiably notorious Journal Communications, Inc. calumnist Patrick McIlheran:

[T]he union ... got a judge — what do you know, but it was Marilyn Sumi!

First of all, it's Maryann Sumi, but I guess you can't really blame the award-winning journalist Patagonia McIlheran, as Judge Sumi's not really been in the news much lately. Evidently Patrice McIlheran finds it comical that Judge Sumi was presiding. He doesn't give any reason why; he doesn't need to. As per usual, he's pandering to his little audience of ill-informed wing-nuts. Here's something else for them.

Supreme Court Justice Patience Roggensack — who comprises that court's hard-right conservative bloc together with Justices Ziegler and Gableman and more often than not Justice David Prosser — was once a judge on the District IV Court of Appeals, which presides over Dane County, which is where Judge Maryann Sumi sits. In that capacity then-Judge Roggensack heard 13 appeals of Judge Sumi's decisions.

Roggensack affirmed 11 of them, affirmed in part and reversed in part one of them, and reversed the one other. The reversal in part had to do with that portion of Judge Sumi's domestic restraining order prohibiting a stalkerish man from possessing a firearm.

However it was pure clerical, and not judicial, error:

It appears from the trial court's statements from the bench that it also found the evidence insufficient on this point, and that the firearm prohibition box was checked on the final written order by mistake. — Per curiam [by the court]

In other words, Judge Maryann Sumi was correctly non-reversible in her judicial findings, but somebody ticked the wrong box on a form.*

In her lone reversal of Judge Sumi, then-Judge Roggensack concluded that while the information provided to a defendant by an arresting officer "created some confusion," it was not erroneous information, and thus Judge Sumi had erred in determining that the defendant's demand for a blood test instead of a breath test was reasonable.

And whenever reasonableness is an issue on appeal, it's a close call.

You know that saying, "reasonable minds can disagree."

So just don't expect to be informed by the award-winning Journal Communications, Inc. journalist Patricio McIlheran that Judge Sumi was affirmed 12 out of 13 times by the most conservative justice on the State Supreme Court, as that would explode his and his disciples' disturbed political fantasies. However you will hear it here, and not through Journal Communications, Inc., which doesn't do corrections.

But thanks for all you do do, JRN.

* Not quite as erroneous as a "journalist" calling a Maryann "Marilyn."

How many sharks can one Shark jump?

Clearly, an infinite amount.

Sometimes I swear WisOpinion.com, the local aggregator of Wisconsin's "opinion leaders," links to stuff just for giggles, much like Jerry Falwell used to get invited on the Sunday morning chat shows so the producers and news editors could chuckle at him. Case in point, Rick Esenberg's pretend lament at the state of affairs on the Wisconsin Supreme Court.

Recall that Bill Lueders broke the story Saturday morning. None of Lueders's sources were named, but he obviously had them. By Saturday evening, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel had managed to obtain a statement from Ann Walsh Bradley, a justice of the Wisconsin Supreme Court, confirming the substantive details of Lueders's story. The Journal-Sentinel also obtained a statement from the accused, David Prosser, that did not deny some physical altercation had taken place, but rather simply varied from the perspective of Justice Bradley's account.

Peake fantasy

Furthermore the Journal-Sentinel obtained statements from two anonymous sources — who remain anonymous as of this writing — neither of which deny some physical altercation but, as does Prosser, present a different perspective of the alleged altercation. So what does Rick Esenberg, an actual professor of the law, make of all this?

Well, first of all, he denounces Lueders for "an embarrassingly bad piece of work" despite the fact that Lueders's report was confirmed by a justice of the Supreme Court who went on the record to confirm it.

What's embarrassing or bad about it exactly, he doesn't deign to reveal, but the professor's unsupported assertions suit perfectly the obfuscatory narrative Esenberg and his fellow travelers are seeking to forward.

And despite even the fact of Justice Bradley's affirmations, Esenberg pronounces her allegations "fantastical," conveniently overlooking Justice Prosser's self-admitted history of aggressiveness toward Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson, whom he had previously threatened to "destroy," and who is relatively small in stature and who is nearly a decade the elder of Prosser. Moreover Bradley had warned against Prosser's behavior in emails she released to a Journal-Sentinel reporter months ago.*

Now all of a sudden the latest in an apparent pattern of reckless and intemperate behavior is "fantastical," like a Mervyn Peake novel.

Justice/Gableman

But what is most remarkable — outrageous, really — about Esenberg's own reckless missive is that he suggests the Wisconsin Judicial Commission back off from carrying through its investigation:

[T]he worst thing, I think, would be to frustrate the will of the voters by the imposition of discipline based upon controverted allegations. That would smack of a coup. It would undermine the legitimacy of the Court. [**]

Let's review a couple of things here.

Justice Prosser would be the third consecutive Wisconsin Supreme Court justice subject to an investigation by the Wisconsin Judicial Commission, all of them self-advertised "conservatives," and all of them members of the court that just two weeks ago abandoned bedrock principles of legal procedure, invented from whole cloth a novel fabrication of the court's jurisdictional authority, imported into its written order and opinions alleged facts that were never even mentioned by any party or court as the case wended its way toward the Michael/Gableman Four, and for all intents and purposes untenably reprimanded a careful, review-proven conservative circuit judge for — ironically — supposedly abusing her authority, a reprimand meted out by the same court that had just moments before whipped into existence its own purported authority.

The allegations Esenberg is talking about are those of Justice Bradley who, it bears again repeating, went on the record to confirm the pertinent details of Lueders's "embarrassingly bad" report. And the "controversions" Esenberg is talking about are those anonymous sources quoted by the Journal Communications, Inc. flagship daily newspaper.

Blinka job safe

Not only does Esenberg accord the latter equal weight, he accords them such countervailing authority that, Esenberg reasons, they should not only drive the Wisconsin Judicial Commission's investigation but in fact discourage the Commission from proceeding. All one might say to that is, thank gods Esenberg is not teaching the law of evidence over there.

Esenberg's "will of the voters," it needs also to be recalled, is Justice Prosser's 0.46% margin of victory over challenger JoAnne Kloppenburg, who for her part realized double-digit (not double-decimal point) surges in popular support between February's primary contest and the April 5 general election — especially in the State's most conservative counties.

Thus would it "smack of a coup" were the Wisconsin Judicial Commission, which is charged by State statute to investigate unprofessional behavior among the State judiciary, to pursue its mandated obligations.

It's quite the amazing performance by Rick Esenberg, who has a long and fairly well documented history of amazing performances. It's . . .

Ta Da! Ol' Prof. Rick is right about one thing though:

Lawyers have been worried about the divisions on the Court [**] for some time now. ... No one likes to say too much about it in public for fear of alienating the people who may decide their clients' matters.

Oh, but I'm sure they would like to say plenty about it, and what they would mostly say Esenberg probably wouldn't want to hear. Because the current divisions on the court are directly traceable to Mike Gableman, who none other than Rick Esenberg championed by defending some of the most disgraceful attacks on former Justice Louis Butler's reputation, character, and professionalism, and whose own then-research assistant's gibberish Esenberg is still publishing at the Marquette LS faculty blog.

Esenberg's "worried lawyers" ain't going to forget. It's one thing to get along — and a good thing — but it's quite another to abandon principles because some partisan ideologue is boo-hooing like a sad crocodile.

Your humble correspondent may not be the disinterested academic ivory tower dweller Rick Esenberg is presented as by Journal Communications, Inc.'s panoply of media dispensaries but I surely do know that much.

* There was some considerable right-wing pearls-clutching over Justice Bradley's handing over the emails to the reporter. However, go have a look in the WisconsinEye.org video archives for the court's open administrative conferences and you will find both Justices Prosser and Roggensack releasing sheafs of interchambers emails to the press.

The political right's shameless hypocrisy is quite the spectacle to behold.

** You do not capitalize court here. Capitalizing court here would be a signal for the United State Supreme Court. This from a professor of law.

Journal-Sentinel encouraged by Walker budget

Even as, the Journal Communications, Inc. daily organ admits, 'the burden of this budget will most likely fall heaviest on children, workers, poor women, and municipalities.' Meanwhile the Journal-Sentinel reports that "what will happen with the collective bargaining measure is still unknown." But yesterday Journal-Communications, Inc. marquee wing-nut Charlie Sykes told his ironic and non-ironic viewers — assuming Charlie Sykes even has any of the latter viewers — that the Wisconsin Supreme Court will exercise its supervisory power over Dane County Circuit Judge Maryann Sumi this morning.* Which would be great timing because Secretary of Capitol Building Maintenance Supervision Mike Huebsch says there will be thousands of protesters in Madison today.

But obviously Charlie Sykes has no idea why the high court would so act.

* The Supreme Court announced on Friday that it will release one opinion tomorrow, June 14, but it isn't "In re Petition of Scott Walker" either.

Journal-Sentinel joins Robin Vos in Gableman recall

So the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, which frequently asserts its corporate constitutional rights to press freedom, has come out in favor of abridging the constitutional rights of the citizens of Wisconsin.

The Journal-Sentinel didn't appreciate this summer's recall elections, the right to which is guaranteed by the State constitution, arguing against along two fronts: 1) Elected officials shouldn't be recalled simply over policy disagreements and 2) The recall elections were too costly.

Journal Communications, Inc.'s business side can't possibly endorse the latter jusification. A huge portion of that $44M spent on advertising ended up as JRN revenue and the Journal-Sentinel's online edition's page views were through the roof, satisfying and attracting advertisers. In fact JRN has an affirmative duty to its shareholders to lobby for more and more and more recall elections and their attendant political gossip.

Nevertheless this morning the Journal-Sentinel supports Republican Assemblyman Robin Vos's proposal to amend the constitution, requiring specific grounds upon which to initiate the recall process — "higher standards," it says, as in, the commission of crimes by elected officials or findings by the Government Accountability Board of ethical violations.

Fine, then, let's accept that for the sake of argument. However, the Government Accountability Board is not responsive to ethical complaints against members of the judiciary which, as we have been observing for the last several years, suits the definition of "elected officials" better even than the elected officials in the political branches of government.

Thus there is no more reason to absorb the Government Accountability Board into the proposed rejiggered recall process than there is to absorb the Wisconsin Judicial Commission, the GAB's corollary for the judicial branch. And as we learned, the statutory framework for the processing of complaints against members of the judiciary proved ineffective in 2010, when the WJC's complaint against a justice of the Supreme Court, Mike Gableman, reached the impasse of an evenly divided tribunal.

The statutes direct the Commission to follow the rules of civil procedure to the best extent possible but at the same time the statutes thwart that goal. It doesn't happen in civil procedure that courts divide on motions for summary judgment (dismissal) because motions for such judgment are brought in trial courts, where a single judge presides.

Recall that, procedurally, the three-judge panel in the Gableman action convened on Gableman's motion for summary judgment. While the panel recommended dismissal, its recommendations are toothless, as they are subject to review by the Supreme Court, which retains the discretion to ignore them completely. And then that court, necessarily Gableman-less and reduced to six members, failed to reach a majority disposition.

Wherefore does the Gableman complaint remain pending to this day.

Which, according to both Robin Vos's and the Journal-Sentinel's own reasoning, presents a classic case for the recall of an elected official in strict conformance with their proposed constitutional amendings.

In other words since the system currently in place failed to get the job done, the remaining recourse is for the people to exercise their right to recall and one expects Vos and the Journal-Sentinel to lead the charge.

Earlier: Robin Vos clears the way for Mike Gableman recall

Puzzled Journal Communications, Inc. is puzzled

Journal Communications, Inc.'s daily organ the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel is puzzled as to where Scott Walker got the idea to stomp all over Wisconsin workers' rights to collectively bargain and negotiate the terms of their contracts. "Speculation persists," announces the organ.

Actually, no. As Scott Walker himself explained, it came from Jesus.

Interlude: Son Of A Preacher Man (Joss Stone)

Patrick "Li'l Milton" McIlheran

Speaking of Journal Communications, Inc., how pleasant it must be to write a guest op-ed for the local paper only to have it savaged within hours by a member of that same paper's editorial board as "a morbidly wretched example of willful, stone-blind irrationality."

Unfortunately the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel's Patrick McIlheran's right-wing guy-savagery is widely misplaced, as he doesn't seem to have understood what the object of his Randian derision was talking about (no surprises there).

In fact, that's the weird part about Patterson's essay: He hooks up "feudal" and "capitalism" in the apparent hope of discrediting the noun with the adjective. But it's like saying "Christian Islam" or "dry water"* — the phrases work only if you wildly distort what you're meaning [sound effect of exploding irony meter goes here].

If Milton McIlheran has never come across the descriptive term feudal capitalism, then he can't be much of an expert in economics, which is supposedly his strong suit. (Or, at least, it's the most common product of his daily rummaging around right-wing blog-sites, regardless of their comically dubious provenance. See, e.g., Dad29.)

One needn't expect McIlheran to endorse Marxist political theory, obviously, any more than one would expect a socialist to approve the Chicago Boys' hopping into the sack with Augusto Pinochet.**

But at least the latter can be reasonably well-informed about it. Unlike the former, who appears to have forged a career out of embarrassing himself in print (admittedly, much to our delight).

McIlheran says the emergence of his dearly beloved capitalism is what ended feudalism. Well, no. Feudalism never went away, is the point. And elements of feudalism survive in the present system as evidenced by the situations described (accurately) by John Patterson.

Patterson's observations seemed straightforward enough to me, and hardly irrational, whether you agree with his prescriptions or not.

But we know by now that McIlheran is a ridiculous calumnist who will stop at nothing — including lying — in his failed attempts to discredit his perceived political opponents.

Or, in this case, discredit an author who'd dare to suggest that the species of capitalism practiced in the U.S. is less than ideal. So McIlheran had to mark his spot, as they say in the animal kingdom.

What's morbidly wretched is that the perceptive John Patterson (or the like) isn't featured more often and the hackish McIlheran, less.

Meet your Journal Communications supastars: "P-Dendro" McIlheran, Charlie "Gone Galt" Sykes, and James T. "Hip Musings" Harris.

* McIlheran came from Minnesota, yet he's unfamiliar with ice.

** Disciples of "Brongblart's Hollywad.com" reportedly sustained a series of mini-aneurysms upon learning Obama Hussein's Malcolm X-Mas tree had no decorative Carlos Castillo balls on it.

The Journal-Sentinel's Rick Esenberg Disclaimer

I see David Haynes and the mandarins on the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel editorial board have added a disclaimer to Marquette University Law School professor Rick Esenberg's attempt at defending Mike Gableman's reported acceptance of a gift or favor from Michael Best & Friedrich, to the effect that Esenberg recently presented oral argument before the court on which Gableman sits. Judges are prohibited by the Wisconsin Code of Judicial Conduct from accepting gifts or favors from lawyers or firms if they have or are likely to come before the judge.

That's a relatively innocuous disclaimer compared to Esenberg's prior relationships with the Gableman political campaign. Esenberg appeared in a video produced by Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce which was distributed at a series of WMC luncheons in 2008. Rick Esenberg's former research assistant at Marquette, Daniel Suhr, assembled a "white paper" criticizing the record of former Justice Louis Butler — perhaps the only actor deserving of the appellation "honorable" in this whole sordid affair — the misrepresentations of law contained in which Esenberg strenuously defended at his blog, where Esenberg also repeated and purported to rationalize some of the sleaziest accusations against Justice Butler.

And Rick Esenberg's Bradley Foundation-funded Kulturkampf boutique law firm, the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, hired Tom Kamenick, a former clerk of Gableman's, as an associate. It's like incest but without the sex. Given the foregoing, the Journal-Sentinel's disclaimer is a bit of a joke. The fact that Esenberg argued a case before the Supreme Court isn't such a big deal, unless you realize what case it was, which the Journal-Sentinel's disclaimer doesn't identify.

The case is Wisconsin Prosperity Network v. Myse and Esenberg presented the argument instead of James "Carried ... feet first" Troupis, who represented Justice David Prosser during the latter's political campaign last spring. It's also the case from which Prosser disqualified himself in September, 2011 apparently after being pressured by the Journal-Sentinel's reporting, even though this blog had pointed to the potential conflict of interest as early as the previous April.

Speaking of which case, Prosser and Gableman literally rewrote the Wisconsin constitution to grant an injunction in 2010 in favor of the plaintiffs, a who's who of conservative Republican activists, the granting of which was executed even before the court had decided whether to take jurisdiction of the case. A decision is forthcoming in Myse but a date hasn't been announced. This blog wondered several weeks ago how a divided court is going to address the posture of that injunction.

The Journal-Sentinel is a wholly owned subsidiary of Journal Communications, Inc., which itself is in effect a wholly owned subsidiary of the WISGOP. The transparency of these relationships is remarkable.

But yeah, thanks for the illuminating disclaimer. Great public service.

WISCONSIN BREAKING: Radio talker lied

Whoops, false false alarm, it was Charlie Sykes.

Given the Pythagorean axiom, "minus one times minus one equals one," maybe if Journal Communications, Inc. had both Sykes* and McIlheran talking at the same time, truth might conceivably result.

* "Charlie Sykes" is actually a stand-alone, all-purpose punchline** in certain quarters, which fact is tremendously comical all of itself.

** And is it any wonder:

© 2010 Journal Communications, Inc.

Acuracy in journalism: Trust us, we're professionals.

Charlie Sykes's "story" that he "created," by the way, consists entirely of somebody else's YouTube video (and not even an affiliate's).

Your Journal Communications, Inc. personalities

Michael Savage: Oslo Attacks Were a Left-Wing Conspiracy

Michael Savage was a compassionate conservative before compassionate conservatism was cool. — 620 WTMJ bio

Among WTMJ-AM's people you know and trust

On teh web: Journal Communications, Inc.

Mike Plaisted for Wisconsin Supreme Court

If you've been following this little corner of the internets for awhile, you know it gets geared up — almost to the point of obsession — during State Supreme Court elections. Not this time around. But I've been paying close attention, albeit with less interest than horror.

I don't think it's the wisest idea among alternatives to subject positions on the court to popular elections, and this one is proving why, because among those alternatives is merit selection, and the related events unfolding are turning merit selection on its head.

Groupthink

While Assistant Attorney General JoAnne Kloppenburg is certainly qualified to the position well beyond the de minimis requirements, if you strip away all the horse hockey that's been played out by all manner of individual and groupthink third-party entities on both sides of the partisan divide — and by the candidates themselves, occasionally — and evaluate the two hopefuls on those merits which are most relevant to consider, then Justice Prosser wins hands-down.

The reason I say this is because I have heard barely a statement from Atty. Kloppenburg about any decisions of a court or any legal doctrine or any judicial philosophy whatsoever, apart from the ad nauseam boilerplate, "I promise to be fair." Perhaps she is a scholar, but she's produced no indication of scholarship and she's been presented with innumerable opportunities and declined — putting it politely — to do so at each. One can't simply move ahead and assume scholarship.

It's nothing personal — as I say, I would expect her to perform admirably — and I don't blame her for playing it safe by not getting into the various meats and the sundry three-pronged potatoes, if that is what she's doing, but I'm just not hearing from a Supreme Court candidate what I should expect to hear, which is, something more than a superficial familiarity with the core businesses of the court: absorbing, expounding, and developing legal doctrine.

Imbroglio

And when I heard from the candidate, as we did during the jockeying for position leading to the February primary that Atty. Kloppenburg sought to make an issue of the Mike Gableman imbroglio but then admitted she hadn't even reviewed all the briefs in Gableman's ethics case (and there aren't all that many of them) I became suspicious, and unfortunately that suspicion has never been sufficiently allayed.

So to begin with, there's that.

Next, there is this: The currently popular portrayal of Justice Prosser as some kind of unhinged misogynist nutcase is patently ridiculous.

I have met him and I have spoken with him, and you couldn't ask to meet or speak with a kinder and more considerate fellow. I have also heard him speak in a professional — as opposed to electioneering — context, reviewing the cases from the court's previous terms.

The guy clearly knows his stuff and has given a lot of thought to that stuff over the course of a lot of years. Whether your humble correspondent agrees with his methods or his results is of no moment to any evaluation of Justice Prosser's knowledge and legal acumen. He's unquestionably got the judge-chops. (That's understatement.)

Super Soaker

I love me some Scot Ross and OWN, but if all you can find to prove up the proposition that the incumbent is the temperamental equivalent of Genghis Khan are clips of the justice getting totally justifiably angry with Mike McCabe when the latter strode into the justice's courtroom fresh from lying recklessly about the justice in some blog-opinion pieces, then you can't have much of a case.

If I was Justice Prosser, that video would have been of me chasing Mike McCabe around the gallery with a Super Soaker or having one of those theatrical 10-ton weights lowered quickly onto his head as he stood at the lectern. So, more power to Prosser on that account.

It's been revealed that Justice Prosser evinced a malicious disrespect for the Chief Justice, and for her office. In no way am I defending that — it's indefensible — but that there court has some serious issues and Justice Prosser at least once lost his sh*t as many of us all-too-human beings do on occasion. For anyone's edification, those serious issues are adequately preserved in the public record.

A total biotch-explosion

All of the court's open administrative hearings are archived at WisconsinEye, and there are many moments of viciousness, just less overt than Prosser's total biotch-explosion. (Easily the most resentfully sarcastic and disrespectful toward the Chief Justice is Mike Gableman.) So it's hardly surprising Justice Prosser blew his stack; what's unacceptable is the manner in which he blew it.

However the presentation of Justice Prosser as a "moderate" and a swing vote on the court is almost equally misleading. There are a couple of ways to approach a court's term of cases: one as a scholar of the law, and one as a political scientist. Ideally, you approach the court's body of work as both. Simply compiling cases according to percentages of who sided with whom can be wildly inaccurate. We saw a good example of this in the hopelessly unconvincing Journal Communications, Inc.* endorsement of Prosser over the weekend.

Those cited percentages lend little credence to the ends to which they were put by Journal Communications, Inc. (although they're well understood by their compiler, David Ziemer, who incidentally is one of the sharper legal writers around, despite having the U.S. Reports citation to Lochner v. New York tattooed on his right bicep**).

Connexionz

For one thing the percentages don't embody a sufficient recounting because some of those majorities are unanimous. You have to look first to the split decisions, then more closely at which justices are concurring and dissenting with each other, and on what grounds, and then especially closely to the results and the reasoning that obtained those results in each individual case to determine the particular questions under consideration and the connexion between the reasoning and the results. And then you make your evaluation of the data based on the legal and poli sci principles you've studied.

Having performed those moves to a not inconsiderable extent over the years, I think it's fair to say that Justice Prosser is a pretty conservative judge, but in the political sense. That is, his results are often politically conservative but his methods are not judicially conservative. That's where I get a little suspicious, and I say this as a fan of Clarence Thomas who, for whatever else you can say about the man — and there is plenty — is consistent in his methods.***

Justice Prosser, for example, has joined an opinion of Gableman's purported to find within the First Amendment's Free Exercise of Religion Clause the right to fire employees in blatant violation of age discrimination law, and in contravention of court orders from magistrates right up to and including the court of appeals, without once explaining — de novo, as a true judicial conservative should and would have — how on whatever specified god's green earth firing employees is a free exercise of religion in the first instance.

That's not judicial conservatism, but that is political conservatism.

Judge So-and-so

A conservative begins with the Constitution, she doesn't set off on some meandering and merely persuasive detour throughout the circuit courts of Delaware and New Mexico and then wind up back somewhere near the Constitution because Judge So-and-so with jurisdiction over Jefferson Parish, LA apparently held as such.

More recently Justice Prosser, again in full concert with Gableman, literally rewrote the Wisconsin constitution in order to enjoin a party to a case even before the Supreme Court had decided to take jurisdiction of that same case. And they didn't present a compelling reason to do so; they couldn't have, simply for the fact there are compelling reasons why the constitution does not mean what they had to insert an entirely new phrase into it to make it mean. That's not judicial conservatism, but that is political conservatism.

Justice Prosser, before Gableman's time but together with Justice Roggensack and with Justice Ziegler's ideological predecessor Justice Wilcox, endorsed a ludicrously unconstitutional amendment to the State's criminal procedural framework that handed over to the executive branch of State government an impermissibly unilateral control over a defendant's life, liberty, and property. That's not judicial conservatism, that's political conservatism.

Deeply disturbance

And Justice Prosser produced from disturbing the thin air by waving a whole cloth at it an exception to Wisconsin's concealed carry law that the text of the statutes in nowise authorized or even implied. That's not judicial conservatism but it is political conservatism.

Then there's the recusal controversies, where Justice Prosser, once again together with the present hard-right bloc, adopted verbatim rules drafted by Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce and the Wisconsin Realtors Association, two archetypal business lobbies. Now as an appearance of impropriety, the circumstances are troubling. However, just because the rules were drafted by corporate concerns doesn't make them bad rules. To so conclude is fallacious.

But the legitimate and legitimately remarkable trouble with the rules for judicial recusal is that they were submitted and adopted verbatim and then the drafters — not the adopting justices — noticed that the rules caused an "absurd" — to coin a legal term of art — result within the framework of the code of judicial ethics. So only by their own detection of the discrepancy and by their own volition, the drafters had to resubmit the rules for (once again, verbatim) re-adoption by the four conservative justices.

Awkward! Alright. I could go on, but I already have.

Thus is my view of Justice Prosser that he is less a judicial conservative than a political conservative, and I'm not saying there is anything inherently wrong with that. It's a legitimate position. But just be aware of it. Of course this is merely my opinion, but I like to think that, as a reasonably diligent student of the law and of the court, I bring at least a little bit of credibility to support it.

You may disagree, and that's cool too.

Forcible

In conclusion, however, the popular consensus in this Great State of Wisconsin appears to indicate the favoring of Supreme Court elections. So I accept that and incorporate it into my reasoning. Although personally I'd rather not do that, the supporters of judicial elections — including Justice Prosser himself — force me to.

And it is in that political spirit that I completely and wholeheartedly support without reservation the efforts of the left to shift the political balance on the court, if only for one very simple reason: What Justice Gableman, WMC, and their other fellow deceitful travelers did to the popular reputation of former Justice Louis Butler throughout 2007-08 was repulsive, and almost unspeakably vile.

I have never met, nor heard from, any lawyer or judge who does not hold Louis Butler in the highest professional and personal regard and if you think Justice Prosser is getting unfairly portrayed this time around, that is nothing compared to the disgraceful calumnies, both overt and subtle, that the political right heaped on Justice Butler.

Punks, thugs, hippies on your marks

And the worst of the perpetrators was none other than our Michael Gableman, who violated the aforementioned code of judicial ethics and then himself and by his counsel fought arrogantly in defense of the indefensible, taking no prisoners along the way.

So to the extent that electing JoAnne Kloppenburg negates whatever power Gableman wields on the court — and there's no question that her election would effectively mitigate his influence to a considerable degree — I say, go for it, all you young punks and all you union thugs and all you dirty co-op hippies. You have my seal of approval.

More importantly, while you can argue 'til you're red-State-in-the-face that it's inappropriate to topple Justice Prosser because Scott Walker and Scott Fitzgerald and J.B. Van Hollen are erratic and reckless custodians of the body politic and I would probably agree that it is inappropriate, I'm helpless because the present politicization of the court is directly the outcome of those who support judicial elections.

Which is to say, in other words: Hey, I'd really like to come to your assistance, but you won't let me. And which is why I today endorse my bestest buddy Mike Plaisted**** for the Wisconsin Supreme Court.

Selah.

* Style note: This blog will hereafter attribute opinion pieces in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel to the corporate entity, Journal Communications, Inc. Straight news reporting — such as it exists anywhere — will continue to be citated to the Journal-Sentinel.

** Mercifully I have no personal knowledge of this statistic; Counselor Ziemer admitted to it on the internets.

*** The recent kerfuffles regarding Mrs. Virginia Thomas are at once amusingly abhorrent and abhorrently amusing, but there's no substance there. Nothing would cause Justice Thomas to vary from his inexorably reductionist pursuits. If anybody out there is seriously expecting Clarence Thomas to stand aside from some Tea interested-Party case, then you are high, as the kids say.

**** Also, because: "He is a good writer." (Very good, in fact.)

Famous last words and a bipartisan laughing stock

"Waukesha County could not save Prosser."

That would be yours truly, tapping away one recent Wednesday morning. How morbidly wrong your scribe now appears to be.

I was correct at the time, however, around the previous midnight hour when overwhelmingly Republican Waukesha County finally reported 100% [sic] of its election returns (WaukCo. had been sitting on the AP's results page at 25% for a couple of nailbiting hours).

Armed with an MS Excel file of February's primary results* and comparing in realtime how Assistant Attorney General JoAnne Kloppenburg was improving her general election score dramatically in county after Wisconsin county (every one of which — contra Scott Walker's ludicrous averments, made now even more so in the wake of a rogue election official's enormous bungle — was not Dane County) it was rapidly becoming apparent that the election would hinge on the ferocity of Kloppenburg's clobbering in Waukesha Co. (for the per se clobbering was never in doubt). Sure enough as Tuesday evening turned to Wednesday morning it had grown clear enough that Prosser's Wauk-klopbering was not severe enough to carry the State.

Forfeit a couple Hun

Kloppenburg had previously accomplished her initially required milestone event, reversing Milwaukee County from 54-46 Prosser to roughly 55-45 K-Burg, the 100% [sic] returns from Waukesha County only put Prosser ahead by a couple of hundred votes and based on what was left and Kloppenburg's rising fortunes throughout the rest of the State's most populous counties,** Election Central here reckoned Justice Prosser would quickly forfeit those couple hun, and remain behind the point of no returns, and start packing his bags for July 31.

Which is pretty much exactly what happened until Kathy Nickolaus, a WaukCo. Republican Party True Believer with an apparently lengthy and documented history of extraordinary incompetence, suddenly "discovered" circa 14K ballots from Brookfield yesterday afternoon.

Now it's gotten so bad somebody's had to retain Ben Ginsberg, Esq., of Washington, DC (favorite place in the whole wide world of the "Tea Party" crowd, courted early and often by Justice Prosser, who today happens to be the somebody that's retained Mr. Ginsberg).

Separation of utterances

You may remember one Brian Nemoir, Justice David Prosser's campaign manager, who uttered the now-infamous December 8, 2010 statement of compliance pledging Prosser's fealty to the recently-elected GOP legislative and executive branches of government.

In my view Prosser should have loudly and forcefully jettisoned Nemoir on December 9, 2010, perhaps by figuratively having him rolled over by one of Scott Walker's old federal stimulus-funded, Canadian-made Milwaukee County Transit System motorcoaches.

Instead, Prosser distanced himself over time from the pledge to varying degrees, for the longest while saying little more than, 'Those aren't the words I would have used,' which struck me as particularly unsatisfying because if there's anybody who knows how many different ways there are to say the exact same thing, it's a lawyer.

The Prosser campaign's December pledge of fealty to the Fitz Van Walker regime remained firmly affixed to the candidate's hide right up until two days before the election, when Journal Communications, Inc. ran it all by us one more time in the course of its incoherent endorsement of the politically conservative Supreme Court justice.

Waukesha ha ha

"Waukesha County" is a punchline among liberals — its mere mention invokes the equivalent velocity of eye-rolling as, for example, does "Charlie Sykes" — and even candidate Kloppenburg made a Waukesha County crack at an appearance in Shorewood (an administrative suburb of Milwaukee but in fact an integral part of Milwaukee).

Funny thing is, it's even a punchline among conservative Republicans.

During one especially candid conversation with a Dane County Republican (that would be yer proverbial hen's tooth) official from a couple of weeks ago (I don't have the link handy; I'll dig it up and post it later) Nemoir's mal-spelled renunciation of the bedrock American constitutional doctrine of separation of powers presented itself.

Quipped Justice Prosser: 'Well I guess there's just a little too much Waukesha County in Brian Nemoir.' Yep, we are knowing the feeling.

* Why the expert wag professors and lawyers insist on comparing Tuesday's results with last November's — or those of the 2008 presidential election, fer the luvva gawd — is beyond your humble correspondent's ken. The political landscape has been altered so substantively by Fitz Van Walker's sundry lawless antics that those prior contests are all but meaningless to the present one. The most directly relevant and of most recent and timely vintage of temperature-taking of the public's attitude toward the Wisconsin Supreme Court general election is, obviously, the Wis. S. Ct. primary election. Or it could be also that the local press has roughly only two of each expert wag professor and lawyer in its desk Rolodex.

More likely the latter, as The Truth is Out Here, and not necessarily anywhere within Journal Communications, Inc. County and environs.

** And a touch of intuition, the poli scientist's ancient Chinese secret.

eta: Jay Bullock debunks once again the Opéra Bouffe that is WPRI.

Can't get enough WPRI? Try the Journal-Sentinel.

Today's Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel has not one but two columns by Wisconsin Policy Research Institute "senior fellows," neither of which identify WPRI for the right-wing Bradley Foundation-funded Republican Party/Scott Walker shill that it is. In fact the president of the Bradley Foundation, Michael Grebe, was Scott Walker's campaign chairman.

WPRI also has a magazine of its own, which is edited by right-wing radio shouter Charlie Sykes. Charlie Sykes is also an employee of Journal Communications, Inc., which owns the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.

And the Journal-Sentinel endorsed Scott Walker for governor of Wisconsin, despite the paper's occasional quarter-hearted editorial page objections to Walker and his henchpeople's policies. Just so you know.

Full disclosure at the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel

Er, not quite.

"Walker returns $170,000 to business group's PAC," it says here: "Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce says it misunderstood GAB guidance on giving." Did you know that Steven J. Smith, chairman of the board and chief executive officer of Journal Communications, Inc., which owns both the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel and the insufferable dissembler Charlie Sykes, and whose local teevee station plays weekly host to sleazy hacks like Brian Sikma of Media Trackers, is also an officer on the board of directors with the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce? Well, you may have known it but you wouldn't have known by reading the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.

And it's not the first time you wouldn't have known it either.

Incidentally MMAC chairman Ulice Payne, Jr. conducted a panel I attended during orientation week at Marquette University Law School which turned out to be devoted exclusively to Payne's glorifying "how much money you will make." Payne, who at the time was a partner at Foley & Lardner, brought along a new associate with the firm and recent graduate of MULS. Payne instructed the young woman to tell the audience what her starting salary was and warned her that if she didn't provide this information then he would. It was a display so unseemly that I had to leave the hall and thence avoid the rest of orientation week.

That's an ostensibly Catholic institution, by the way, so perhaps Payne was emphasizing "how much money you will make" so you can give lots of it to charity. But I doubt it because Payne further emphasized that $10K of the new attorney's compensation was in clothing allowance, and the young associate wasn't exactly dressed in sackcloth (nor was Payne).

This while the State Bar of Wisconsin labors to disabuse the popular perception of attorneys as money-grubbing. Deftly played, Mr. Payne.

Teach those baby lawyers well.

Concerned MSM elitists are concerned

It's unclear why all of these East Coast elitist mainstream media types* are suddenly so fascinated by the Badger State, but here's the latest example of their concern-trolling from the Wall Street Journal:

After serving four years, voters had seen enough of his brand of judicial philosophy, making him the first sitting justice on the Wisconsin Supreme Court in four decades to lose a retention election last year.

Conspicuously, none of those political Brainiacs is capable of extending their "theory" to an explanation of why Wisconsinites delivered 69 of the State's 72 counties this year to Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson, whose "brand of judicial philosophy" should be — by any of their own measures — even more repugnant to them, since she voted with Butler in every single decision which so greatly offends, and even authored one of the two that the WSJ mentions.

And, as a matter of WSJ-escaping fact, in that case Butler joined a concurring opinion separate from Abrahamson's emphasizing that statutory caps on exactly the type of legal damages at issue certainly can be constitutional, but in this instance they weren't on account of the evidence of arbitrariness and dithering** in the legislative record.

In other words, if laws infringe against the protections guaranteed to the people of Wisconsin by their constitution, then there had better be — at a bare minimum — a consistent basis for the legislature's reasoning. And here, the record demonstrated otherwise.

That's the courts' function: To ensure the people's representatives aren't acting against the people's best interest, as expressly articulated in the constitution. The people said the latter controls.

You'd expect this foundational concept to appeal to the average Tea Party-er as they're making a spectacle of pinning giant copies of constitutions to their chests and weeping along with Glenn Beck.

What the Wall Street Journal is implicitly demanding is that if the courts are performing their function effectively, then throw the judges out and replace them with a matching set of rubber stamps.

Even — and especially — if you have to lie to do it.

Why not get straight to the point and eliminate the legislature itself while they're at it, and just re-institute a monarchy. Constitutional republicanism would be so much simpler (the WSJ prefers the Big-R version, which is their irrational basis — minus even the teeth).

At his confirmation hearing this month, Mr. Butler was quick to make light of his double rejection by Wisconsin voters, telling the Senate Judiciary Committee that "After 16 years on the bench, I may be a better judge than a politician."

Ahem. That's a coded nod to liberal groups like the George Soros-funded Justice at Stake that are trying to eliminate judicial elections.

This is a purely speculative partisan fantasy, and an ignorant one at that. If it's a "coded nod" at all, it's to the sleazy program of bottom feeding poli-ticks advanced by Michael Gableman and his supporters, which Louis Butler possessed the judiciousness (I know — what an unusual quality for a judge) and the plain common decency to resist.

So it's blindingly obvious who are the ones making the most compelling argument for eliminating judicial elections.

In Ferdon v. Wisconsin Partners ...

It's Wisconsin Patients. These characters can't even read a case caption, let alone engage the decision's other 178 pages, and we're supposed to extend to them a presumption of objective credibility?

Only a local medium wave sad harlequin like Charlie Sykes,*** one of the aforementioned more vocal supporters, would do such a manifestly foolish thing. And that tells you plenty, also.

Plenty amusing, pathetic, or some of each, there's your trilemma.

* It wouldn't surprise me if they went to Stanford Harvard too.
** More recently not a conservative Republican Value.™
*** As a 50K-watt marquee employee of Journal Communications, Inc. (NYSE:JRN), about as elite as mainstream media can get 'round here.

DA must act to seize Charlie Sykes's computer

DEVELOPING NOW: SEIU MAN TALKED POLITICS ON LABOR DAY!
Local 48 official also ate fish fries, fixed lawnmower on weekends

Yesterday a fake comment, falsely attributed to "capper" a.k.a. Chris Liebenthal, was published on Charlie Sykes's blog, which is hosted by Journal Broadcast Group, the AM squawk radio division of Journal Communications, Inc. over which top howler Charlie Sykes presides.

It was time-stamped 12:06 p.m. Naturally this led to another succession of baseless and histrionic speculation among Sykes's disciples as to what Chris was getting up to at work and elsewhere.

Sykes is currently alone among the "lamestream media" in helping publicize the hapless allegations of wrongdoing lodged against Chris.

At the moment the bogus comment is still on full display at the Charlie Sykes-Journal Broadcast Group's website, except now it's time-stamped 5:06 p.m.* We hereby demand an investigation.

Charlie Sykes had himself a grand old pants-wetting time Wednesday basking in glee at Chris's phony persecution. At the heart of a local nut-right outfit's attack against Chris are three or four of Chris's blog posts time-stamped while he was at home enjoying one of the many non-compensated days off he was treated to by Scott Walker (co-incidentally Charlie Sykes's fair-haired boy and Chris's nemesis).

This is evidence. Clearly, the DA ought to seize Sykes's computer.

Signed,
Guardians of First Amendment Journamalism
Chas. Sykes Pulitzer-nominating Committee

See also: Jay Bullock, Destroyer of "Evidences."**

* It's not the first time Charlie Sykes's slavish devotees have hijacked Chris's online ID and persona. And in an earlier instance, it was none other than ... Charlie Sykes who was right in the thick of it, falsely attributing to Chris statements that Chris had never made.

** And, on a couple of those other days, fierce blizzards blew into Milwaukee, Wisconsin. One was described as the equivalent of a Category 2 hurricane. What is all of this other than a sleazy witch hunt, with the reliable groundfish Charlie Sykes goading it along.

The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel's point of view

"The [May 8 primary] election will again feature 'fake' or 'protest' candidates, depending on one's point of view," sez the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. Those are candidates running under the rubric 'Democrat' even though they were "recruited by the Republican Party," which calls them "protest" candidates. The J-S then goes on to refer to them as "protest candidates" five times and never as "fake candidates."

Because, ya know, it "depends on one's point of view."

On teh web: Journal Communications, Inc.

Zielinski touches a Journal Broadcasting nerve

Creating 250,000 jobs ... in Red Communist China

After Wisconsin Dems spokesman Graeme Zielinski went on AM 620 WTMJ yesterday and treated a pair of radio hosts to a blinding glimpse of the obvious — that the station is a continuous shill for conservative Republicans in power — its teevee corollary, Today's TMJ-4, ran this as its lead story. "It got ugly," sez the Journal Communications, Inc. subsidiary, because Zielinski referred to Scott Walker as a "joker." Journal Broadcast Group Vice President Steve Wexler "thought it was odd" that Graeme Zielinski "critique[d] our programming." Hahaha.

Is Steve Wexler a joker too? See that there pic?

Mr. Wexler is literally selling those on dry goods and gewgaws.*

They sure think we're stupid, don't they.

* Note the metric system, favored by socialist regimes worldwide. And, here's an interesting item on Hanesbrands, the manufacturers of WTMJ's CafePress.com Scott Walker swag, shipping American jobs off to China.

So, yeah, "jokers" is a pretty good fit. And a grotesque understatement.

eta 01: "Throw a blazer over later for country club mingling."

That would be your Charlie Sykes/Scott Walker public relations geniuses.

eta 02: [Most Excellent] Post by Jake.