Category: Madison Protest

Today is my birthday.  I’ve been in a bad mood for a couple weeks, and have decided that for my birthday, I will give myself the means to cure it.  That’s what this is.

I am, as of this moment, putting a bounty on Scott Walker’s governorship.  Anybody who can demonstrate that they are the proximal cause of Scott Walker resigning as governor of Wisconsin will receive a bounty of not less than $1,000.  That’s what I’m putting into the pot, though if other people are willing to contribute, I will organize it and post the updated totals.

If you offer Scott Walker a job that is so good, he resigns to take it, I will give you $1,000.

If you dig up a scandal so egregious that Scott Walker resigns in shame, I will give you $1,000 (and mad props, because I can’t imagine what would actually shame him into resigning)

If you do something illegal that causes Scott Walker to resign, I will first consult a lawyer, then if I’m told it won’t get me sent to jail, I will give you $1,000.

I am not soliciting anything illegal.  If your plot for getting Walker to resign requires illegal action and you go through with it, that is up to you and done on your own responsibility.

I’m also willing to pay out the bounty in goods of equal value if, for some reason, you’d prefer that.

This is not a joke.  I am dead serious.  If you want to help, or have an idea, contact me.  This is plan B, and I’m ready to work just as hard on it as I did on plan A.

Fuck democracy.

In case you missed the memo, today is election day in Wisconsin.  If you’re going to vote for Barrett, go vote!

Yesterday I had a great deal of fun while killing myself with too much canvassing.  During my first turf, I met a lady who claimed she’s a life-long Democrat voting for Walker.  She was horrified by the senators fleeing the state, and thinks the Recall is a waste of time and money, etc.  “I’m a life-long not-Democrat who called my Senator to thank him for leaving, and am so horrified by what the Republicans are doing I’m on your porch and would like to argue with you.  Do you mind?”  She did not mind.  It was awesome.  No minds were changed, but I knew there had to be somebody like her out there in the world, and I got to be the one to find her.

Honestly, I’ve been getting so much awesome sent my way in the last ten days, I’m terrified we’re about to lose big just for cosmic balance.  Yeah, my superstitious tendencies are weirdly paranoid.

On my third turf out yesterday (lesson learned: two turf limit!), I made a woman cry by agreeing with her.  I have no idea whether she was a Barrett supporter or a Walker supporter, though given the targeting of the list I was working probably the former.  She was one of the last doors I hit, and apparently I was the last of the four groups out canvassing to reach her.  She’d also been called several times, and has apparently been watching TV and listening to the radio.  In short, she was very stressed and well past her tolerance for being campaigned at.  I just let her go, venting about how everything has divided the state, how fortunately she still gets along with her neighbors but that’s not the case for many other people, how of course everybody is going to vote and they made up their minds months ago so could we all just go home and stop wasting our time and bothering people?  I did a lot of nodding and making sympathetic noises, and by the time she was done she was crying.  If I were a nicer person, I’d have offered her a hug.  It didn’t even occur to me she might want one until I’d walked away.

Here’s the thing; her facts were wrong, but her sentiments were right.  It’s not a waste of time to canvass, because people are crap at actually going and voting, and this election is going to be all about turnout.  The state was deeply divided before the Recall efforts started, it was just easier for people to ignore.  I mentioned all of that to her, and she nodded and kept going because at this point, for her, the technicalities of the situation don’t matter anymore.  She’s had this huge, ginormous, high-stakes thing thrown at her all out of sync with how it’s supposed to work, and she’s in for five more months of this for the presidential election after today.  It’s overwhelming, and hostile, and unfair and the only way for her to escape it is to cut off her media access to the outside world, and to stop answering her phone and door.

This in a state with a reputation for frustrating pollsters because people don’t talk politics, even to strangers for science.

This election is absurd on so many levels, I have trouble communicating it.  Part of that, for me, is my confusion that locking the capital and violating the open meetings laws not only aren’t such an outrage that those alone are enough to guarantee a successful election, but that I seem to be the only person still talking about them.  It’s really hard for me to disagree with people arguing that the recall is just a bunch of sore losers out for retribution when their campaign looks exactly like that.  But this recall isn’t about rehashing 2010, at least not for me.  The Democrats stayed home, and they got what they deserved.  Maybe they’ll learn their lesson and show up next time, end of story.  I’m okay with that story.

What I’m not okay with is a government which has rules about how it goes about being the government, and doesn’t follow them.  The Republicans saying, “Hey, we’ve got both houses of the legislature and the Governor’s office, we’re doing what we like and you’re going to suck it up,” makes them assholes, but that’s what you get for letting them win.  It’s the Republicans saying, “We have the majorities, so now we’re above the rules,” where the line gets drawn.  This recall is about saying, hey, we’re not anarchists for a reason.  The Game is badly designed, rigged, and full of idiots and jerks and people who don’t play with the same win conditions, but there are rules to the Game, and if they aren’t going to be followed, then I may as well turn anarchist.

I think, in a way, that’s what overwhelmed my crying lady.  Everything is falling apart, nobody is actually talking about it, and she can’t cope.  Losing today means that over a year ago, Scott Walker dissolved the government of Wisconsin, and got away with it.  Winning today means, not that the government got saved, because nobody’s running on saving the government, but that Scott Walker dissolved the government of Wisconsin, and got slapped for it.  Whether we’re still facing anarchy is a whole other question.

I really should have offered that lady a hug.

Tomorrow is kinda a big deal – election day.  I’ve been repeating a lot of themes over the last week, so I’ll put them all here to keep people from having to ask the same questions again and again.

First, all celebrating I do tomorrow and, really, up through Friday, is going to be because oen way or another, this is over.  On Friday, I may be willing to celebrate victory or cope with defeat, but given past electoral history in Wisconsin, and the fact that absentee ballots, of which there are a lot, don’t have to be received until Friday, I’m going to go ahead and assume nothing is certain before then.  I’d advise you to do the same.

Secondly, ignore all the polls and the doom, gloom and dismay people seem to be having in response to them.  All of the ones with sound methodology are within the margin of error, all the ones without wind up that way when corrected.  This election is going to come down to turn out, plain and simple.  We wouldn’t be in this situation if the Democrats hadn’t stayed home in 2010, so hopefully they’ve learned their lesson.  If GOTV is as organized in the rest of the state as it is in Madison, I’m pretty confident we’ll do well.  The ground game is, for once, well run.  We can thank the Obama campaign for that.  Walker doesn’t have a ground game, as far as I can tell, just tons of money.

Thirdly, even for people who aren’t in Wisconsin, this election should be fascinating to you.  You’d be hard pressed to find a better experiment for testing the actual efficacy of money in politics.  The Republicans have dramatically more money than the Democrats in this fight; the Democrats have dramatically more volunteer and organizational support.  If the Republicans win, everybody upset by the Citizens United ruling has a much better case for their position than I have, up to this point, felt they have.  If the Democrats win, I’ll probably actually sit down and write that blog post about money in politics that’s been stewing in the back of my head for a while.  (In other words, I’m waiting to make sure I’m right before telling other people to quit whining.  Being wrong on the internet is for other people)

Finally, if you are an eligible voter in Wisconsin, I strongly urge you to go vote tomorrow, if you haven’t already, and to vote for Barrett.  If you aren’t going to vote for Barrett, I strongly urge you to instead avoid the lines and stay home.  Watch a movie or something.  Of course everybody should have their say in government, but just now, there are certain says I’m not interested in hearing.  I’m sure you understand.

If you’re an eligible Wisconsin voter, today is the last day for voting in the Recall primaries.  There are roughly four candidates you can vote for to help get rid of the guy who took away my train, went about being evil badly, then trapped me in a building with people who are not nerds for a week.  I can’t let that kind of behavior slide, and neither should you.

He’s also driven a few industries out of the state, is under investigation for major ethics violations, and signed really egregious anti-women’s-health legislation, if you’d like more common reasons for being upset.

Protect the world from boring mis-management: Get rid of Walker.  Today.  By voting.

(I voted for Art about ten days ago.  This is encouraged, but not required.)

Last week the Wisconsin state assembly passed a measure that’s the first step toward amending the state constitution for recalls.  I don’t think anybody has to think very hard to figure out my opinion of the effort.  If you do here it is: It’s a dumb, petty, pointless effort put forth by cravens and cowards.  Buy me something tasty and I’ll tell you how I really feel.

Since last week was just a hair on the unreasonable side of busy, I saved the article to blog about it but didn’t get around to it.  This far behind the ball I’d normally just let it go.  Except.

Under current law, no grounds are needed to seek a recall.

This line, or one very like it, is cropping up in all the reporting about it, and it’s driving me nuts.  It’s one of those technically true things that come up in order to lie.  True, the current constitution doesn’t say anything about what constitutes valid grounds for a recall.  What it does say is this:

Bolding and underlining mine, because this is where the technical truth, rhetorical lie dynamic comes into play.  There is nothing there about criminality, incompetence, ethics violations, insulting grandma, or whatever else somebody might consider valid grounds for a recall.  What it does have are two rather important restrictions on how a recall can be done and what it takes for it to be successful.  And these restrictions accomplish the function of specifying what constitutes grounds for a recall far more effectively than actually enumerating the valid critera.

Let’s take a look at the first bit I bolded, the part about having to wait a year to file a recall. This means several things.  The first is that nobody is likely to ever file a recall petition against a member of the Assembly.  They only have two year terms, so at best you get somebody out a few months early.  It’s not worth it.

The second is that you can’t immediately turn around and redo the election if a lot of people are suddenly unhappy when the results come out.  Say a third party split the vote on one side and all of a sudden a majority isn’t happy because they agree the guy who won is a bad idea.  Tough, wait a year, and while you’re at it, learn some electioneering.  You know what?  After a year, the squabbling side split by the third party is going to be squabbling again.  Don’t believe me?  I’m going to claim the long, long history of no recalls even over close elections as evidence to support this claim.  You could counter-argue that nobody was paying attention before.  I’ll rest my case on your counter-argument.

What this provision does is give the candidate time to actually serve in office, and protect them from punitive recalls that have more to do with the election than their performance.  It also annoys the hell out of me, because there’s nothing stopping a candidate from doing unquestionably unacceptable thing x on inauguration day and then getting away with it for a year.  On the other hand, there are other ways for dealing with anybody who does unacceptable thing x on inauguration day if leaving them in office for a year is going to be catastrophic.  It’s not like one person has the power to quash protest.  And even if that did happen, there’s protection in separation of powers.  Or, well, there’s a reason I love the whole Bill of Rights and not just the starting bit.  (No, you cannot quarter troops in my house.  I won’t let you!)

So there’s already protection against backlash, punitive recalling that isn’t based on things done while in office.  The second bit I highlighted is even more important.  In order to have a recall, you have to get a signature from a number of electors (that is, people eligible to vote) equal to 25% of the people in the relevant district who voted for governor.  That’s not just for gubernatorial recalls, that’s for any recall.  In other words, the constitutional provision creates a burden that is based on the biggest potential number of voters.  Executive branch elections get the highest voter turn out.  Most people only vote for president, with the other executive offices generally also enjoying privileged status.  They’re just sexier to voters, and always have been.  So if I want to recall my state senator, it doesn’t matter if me and my two crotchety neighbors up the street are the only ones who voted for him; if my entire district turned out to vote for governor, I need 25% of my entire district to help me overrule my two crotchety neighbors.

Now, I could file for a recall and start collecting signatures, but do you have any idea what the return on investment is for canvassing?  It’s crap.  We got a million signatures for the Walker recall, not because we went door to door or called a tons of people, but because if you were standing on a street corner with a clipboard and a “Sign here” sign, traffic would stop to come to you.  That.  Doesn’t.  Happen.  Especially not in the absence of something that really pisses off a ton of people.  I would suggest that any list of acceptable reasons for a recall that does not include something which can motivate people to that degree is a terminally flawed list.

The current design of the recall provision in the Wisconsin constitution is actually a really great piece of law.  It does exactly what I think any law should do.  It’s clear, specific, and designed so that it maximizes desired outcomes in a fashion both flexible and portable to changing conditions.  Standards for what unacceptable behavior by an elected official change.  By not citing them directly, but instead creating a burden that functionally requires a violation of those standards, the law is automatically self-updating.  It gets my highly desired seal of approval.

And even if this proposed amendment had been part of the constitution a year ago, I’d probably get my recall anyway.  Scott Walker likes making things easy for me just that much.

Almost exactly ten months ago, I put up a list of goals I had for the whole protest/recall/Wisconsin is screwed movement.

The budget got passed, so I missed the first goal.  We got six recall elections but didn’t win all of them, so I vaguely missed that goal, too.  There are several things I could point at as potential Anti-Tea Party things, so I’ll call that goal in progress with likely success.  The fight access to the capitol continues, and there’s a whole clutch of people who make a point of waging it, so I have definitely nailed the last goal.

Which leaves us with the second goal; getting rid of Scott Walker.  (Public flogging on the square is still acceptable to me)  The project to recall the governor has changed my plans, everything from when/where I go on vacation to which jobs I’m willing to take.  And bitches, I’m winning that fight.  Over one million signatures when just over half that were required.

You’ll hear stories about fake names, duplicate signatures, and that they’re all from the deluded hippie land that is Dane county.  These stories are not true.  There are going to be lawsuits, and primaries and Republicans screaming about out of state paid workers and out of state money while they’re fundraising in Texas, and at the end of the day what matters is this: One.  Million.  Signatures.

Maybe instead of bookshelves, my next carpentry project could be a stockade.

I’ve been telling people for months that there was no doubt there would be a recall election for the Governor of Wisconsin, that the number of signatures needed was trivial next to the swathes of people irritated, dismayed, or pissed off by Walker’s agenda and political style.  For those of you who thought I’d developed an uncharacteristic streak of optimism or naivete, well, one of us was wrong and it wasn’t me.  I suppose it’s possible that we won’t manage to get as many signatures in the next six weeks as we did in the last two, but color me skeptical.

That said, one of the things people on the ground have been noticing is a reluctance by some people to sign the second recall petition, the one for Lieutenant Governor Rebecca Kleefisch. And honestly, the number of people who just blindly sign the petition for her because I tell them to squicks me out.  I mean, yes, I am a reliable authority, the final arbiter of morality and justice, and deeply knowledgeable and right about everything, but that doesn’t mean you should just take my word for it and remove somebody for office.  I have more respect for the people who say, “I don’t know anything about her, no thanks.”  And utter contempt for the people who say that, then don’t go learn anything.

Dudes, Kleefisch is at least as scary as Walker.  Here, let me show you how.  And then you can go ahead and sign that petition and I won’t judge you for it, ‘kay?

Let’s start with a source that will be, I suspect uncontroversial: hers.  We’ll set aside petty commentary about how she has the same creepy, toothed smile in every photo and move on to actual content.  As of this writing, the top two articles on the website are a report about Wisconsin leading in manufacturing jobs, and another article touting how Wisconsin has swiped 111 jobs from Mexico.  We’re open for business y’all, ain’t it grand?  I’m particularly amused by the second article, what with the juicy implications that we’re getting good American jobs back from those Mexicans.  It’s a shame this is hollow propaganda.  So she gets points for well targeted rhetoric, which I can always respect, but loses them for being just a teeny bit out of touch with reality in a really obvious way.

The next two articles are, in my opinion, much more fun.  The first talks about how she’s returning to her Tea Party roots.  I’m glad this wasn’t the first article because so many people would have considered that damning enough and nobody would have read on about the Mexico rhetoric.  There’s a great picture of her (I think?) with the Gadsden flag, which I still love, and will remain eternally bitter over its appropriation.  I suspect her constituents get the same happy thrill, without the dirty self-loathing chaser.

The next article is about the summer recall elections.  There’s nothing original there except the headline, “Media Agrees: Summer Elections Endorse Walker.”  Then three quotes from three different news organizations.  Not any direct shenanigans going on in that article, but I feel obligated to point out that while I can bitch extensively about the summer recalls, the Republicans outspent the Dems by a significant margin, yet the Dems won more of those elections than they lost.  And the Republicans are frantically fundraising because they spent their war chest for the presidential campaign last summer.  (Or, at least the ones who feel entitled to my wallet are)  Were the summer recalls embarrassing?  Yes.  A defeat?  Er, not really.  I’d call it a draw.

The rest of her webpage is boring.  Lots of Tea Party key words, no content.  You have plenty of links if you want to poke at it yourself.  Let’s move on.

May I take a moment to express my appreciation for the AV Club?  I think I can.  Also, bitch snarked at my train.  My gut reaction to people snarking at my train is the best argument against conceal carry out there.  That said, conceal carry and the castle doctrine have to be the two things they’ve done they don’t piss me off.  But leave my train alone.

It gets a little bit touched on in the campaign ads linked to by the AV Club, but here’s the thing you all probably have heard about from Rebecca Kleefisch: Same-sex marriage is a slippery slope to dog marriage.  Way back in the day a similar rant from a similar politician knocked me off my “Government should get out of marriage” stance and into enthusiastic support for gay marriage.  His slippery slope argument was that after liberating teh gays we’d slide into permitting plural marriage.  Can I bring sleds to this slope?  Also, I like the ribbons on this hand basket.

And, finally, I leave you with her PolitiFact file.  She gets up to half-truth, and that’s as far as she goes.  Oops.  Well, now you know.  And now you can see why keeping her from sneaking into office behind Walker might be a really, really good idea.