Tag Archives: Wisconsin

May 1, 2013 · 5:33 PM

Wisconsin Church Cancels Former NFL Player’s Speech For Supporting Jason Collins

The fact is…the “church” is bullying LeRoy Butler.

Think Progress

LeRoy Butler, former safety for the Green Bay Packers, was scheduled to give an anti-bullying presentation at a Wisconsin church this summer, but now the speech is off because he supported Jason Collins for coming out this week. Butler shared the following in a series of tweetstoday:

Wow, I was schedule to speak at a church in WI, and a member said that the pastor wants to cancel my event, I said ok why? Then I was told, because I said congrats to Jason Collins on twitter, I said really? we have a contract, he said check the moral cause. FYI the fee was 8500$,then I was told if i removed the tweet, and apologize and ask god forgiveness, I can have the event, I said no.

Then later:

I found out what happened, I guess some parents went to the church and complained about my tweet for support of Jason Collins, so sad.

Butler believes the church’s decision constitutes bullying.  In fact, when he tried to resolve the situation with the church’s pastor by saying, “We agree to disagree,” the anti-gay pastor countered, “No, I’m right and you’re wrong.”

Butler’s controversial tweet?

It’s too bad; it sounds like this church could use the kind of anti-bullying lesson Butler has to offer.

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February 12, 2013 · 8:22 AM

NRA Dismisses ‘Connecticut Effect,’ Suggests Grief Over Newtown Tragedy Will Be Short-Lived

What pat of “National tragedy” do those folks at the NRA not understand?  The Newtown shooting took place in mid-December.  The tragedy in Newtown is not going away…

Think Progress

The National Rifle Association will wait until the “Connecticut effect” has subsided to resume its push to weaken the nation’s gun laws, according to a top NRA lobbyist speaking at the NRA’s Wisconsin State Convention this weekend.

Though the NRA had been tight-lipped about how the Newtown tragedy would affect their efforts, lobbyist Bob Welch, who represents the Wisconsin NRA group, was anything but during their yearly meeting.

“We have a strong agenda coming up for next year, but of course a lot of that’s going to be delayed as the ‘Connecticut effect’ has to go through the process,” Welch, a former Republican state senator, told the Wisconsin’s NRA State Association during the legislative update. The group’s president, Jeff Nass, had previously mentioned that they would push the Republican-controlled legislature to pass a Stand Your Ground law, the likes of which became famous following the shooting death of Trayvon Martin in Florida.

Welch went on to bemoan the fact that the public’s focus on Newtown was preventing the NRA from pushing such bills through the legislature, but his remarks soon turned to braggadocio about the NRA’s legislative influence. He relayed an anecdote about how, following the Connecticut shooting, a pro-gun Democrat in the legislature had mentioned his desire to close the gun show loophole. “And I said [to him], ‘no, we’re not going to do that,” Welch boasted. “And so far, nothing’s happened on that.”

WELCH: We have a strong agenda coming up for next year, but of course a lot of that’s going to be delayed as the “Connecticut effect” has to go through the process. [...] What’s even more telling is the people who don’t like guns pretty much realize that they can’t do a thing unless they talk to us. After Connecticut I had one of the leading Democrats in the legislature—he was with us most of the time, not all the time—he came to me and said, “Bob, I got all these people in my caucus that really want to ban guns and do all this bad stuff, we gotta give them something. How about we close this gun show loophole? Wouldn’t that be good?” And I said, “no, we’re not going to do that.” And so far, nothing’s happened on that.

Listen:

One of the ways the NRA remains so effective is through a massive level of political spending. Last year alone, the group spent $32 million in an effort to weaken the nation’s gun laws, including $6 million on lobbyists. Such an onslaught of political spending gives Welch the belief, whether true or not, that even those who advocate for stronger gun laws “realize they can’t do a thing unless they talk to us.”

In reality, however, the NRA is much more of a paper tiger, and its weak record in elections hardly justifies the kind of deference lawmakers pay toward the gun lobby. An analysis of the NRA’s spending revealed that “NRA contributions to candidates have virtually no impact on the outcome of Congressional races,” and recent polling suggests voters are more likely to punish a candidate for having NRA backing than to reward allegiance to the gun lobby.

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January 29, 2013 · 9:46 AM

Walker starts to get cold feet on electoral scheme

The Maddow Blog

Over the weekend, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) offered cautious encouragement to Republicans hoping to rig the 2016 presidential election by changing how his state allocates electoral votes. The conservative governor didn’t explicitly endorse the idea, but Walker called it “interesting” and “worth looking at.”

Yesterday, the Wisconsin Republican was far more circumspect.

Gov. Scott Walker says he has a “real concern” about a Republican idea to change the way the state awards its electoral votes, conceding the move could make Wisconsin irrelevant in presidential campaigns. [...]

“One of our advantages is, as a swing state, candidates come here. We get to hear from the candidates,” said Walker in an interview Saturday at a conservative conference in Washington, D.C. “That’s good for voters. If we change that, that would take that away, it would largely make us irrelevant.”

That’s a far cry from what Walker was saying over the weekend, and it’s a welcome change. What’s more, it’s worth noting that the governor happens to be correct — if Wisconsin changed to a system in which electoral votes are dictated by gerrymandered district lines, the state would immediately go from key, contested battleground to campaign afterthought.

Indeed, that applies to any of the other states (Michigan, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Ohio, and Florida) where the election-rigging scheme has been discussed — candidates and their campaign teams wouldn’t have any incentive to invest time and energy in states where the outcome is predetermined.

So, does this mean Walker is against the idea?

It remains unclear — he told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that he’s “qualified” his comments from the weekend, and he’s “not embracing” the scheme, at least not yet.

Walker added, “The most important thing to me long-term as governor on that is what makes your voters be in play.” And if that’s true, this plan is a non-starter, since it would do the exact opposite.

This would, incidentally, put Walker at odds with RNC Chairman Reince Priebus, a long-time ally of the governor who’s also from Wisconsin and who’s endorsed the scheme.

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December 10, 2012 · 12:10 AM

Michigan Governor Snyder Slammed For Sneaking Through Anti-Union Rules

Michigan Governor Rick Snyder will surely feel the blow-back from his unethical actions last week…

Alan Colmes’ Liberaland

The Detroit Free Press, which had endorsed Rick Snyder for governor, went after him for pushing through a right-to-work law, calling it a “failure of leadership” and a betrayal of voters.

For two years, we supported Snyder as he took painful steps to restore Michigan’s fiscal stability and confront a crisis in which plunging tax revenues and mounting obligations to retired workers threatened to cripple the state’s cities and school districts.

We criticized the governor for signing legislation that burdened a woman’s right to choose, condoned discrimination against gays, and beggared colleges and universities to pay for business tax cuts.

But we also indulged many compromises Snyder maintained were necessary to advance his pro-growth agenda. And when ideologues on the right and left mounted campaigns designed to hamstring state government by limiting its authority to raise revenues, regulate labor relations, and fund critically needed infrastructure, we joined the governor in opposing them.

In short, we trusted Snyder’s judgment.

That trust has now been betrayed — for us, and for the hundreds of thousand of independents who voted for Snyder with the conviction that they were electing someone more independent, and more visionary, than partisan apparatchiks like Wisconsin’s Scott Walker or Florida’s Rick Scott.

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November 10, 2012 · 9:27 AM

Why John Boehner Has Gerrymandering to Thank for His Majority

Many uninformed voters and political pundits believe that the GOP led Congress had a mandate this election, hence their retention of a majority inin the United States Congress.  Not so…

Mother Jones

In November 2010, I reported that GOP control of all elements of state government in key swing states—including but not limited to Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, and Pennsylvania—could ensure a “Republican decade” in control of the House of Representatives. The Democrats’ massive 2010 losses couldn’t have come at a worse time for the party. Because the census was taken in 2010, GOP control of state legislatures and governors mansions around the country gave Republicans the power to draw congressional district lines largely as they chose. They seized that chance, aggressively gerrymandering so as to protect Republican incumbents and endanger any remaining Democrats. The Dems would have done the same thing, of course, had they won control of these crucial states in 2010. But they didn’t.

On Tuesday, the GOP cartographers’ hard work paid off. Despite sweeping wins for Democrats in US Senate races and a broad Electoral College victory for President Barack Obama, it was clear early in the night that Republicans would hold on to the House. As Slate‘s Dave Weigelnoted, “ridiculous gerrymanders saved the House Republican majority.” In many states the president won convincingly, Democrats elected a minority of the House delegation. Here are the numbers for states that Obama won or came close and where Republicans drew the congressional map:

  • North Carolina, which Obama lost by around 2 percentage points: 9-4 GOP
  • Florida, which Obama won by around half a percentage point: 17-10 GOP
  • Ohio, which Obama won by nearly 2 percentage points: 12-4 GOP
  • Virginia, which Obama won by around 3 percentage points: 8-3 GOP
  • Pennsylvania, which Obama won by more than 5 percentage points: 13-5 GOP*
  • Wisconsin, which Obama won by 6 percentage points: 5-3 GOP
  • Michigan, which Obama won by 8 percentage points: 9-5 GOP

It goes to show that when you get to choose the ground on which electoral battles are fought, you’re very likely to win them.

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October 31, 2012 · 12:50 AM

3 ways Hurricane Sandy complicates Mitt Romney’s path to victory

The Week

Mitt Romney is rewriting his itinerary for the final days of the campaign thanks to the storm’s rampage. Will that hurt his chances?

Mitt Romney sits on his campaign bus on Oct. 29 en route to a rally in Avon Lake, Ohio: The Republican presidential nominee canceled his campaign events Monday and Tuesday due to Hurricane Sandy.

Mitt Romney canceled several campaign events Monday and Tuesday “out of sensitivity for the millions of Americans in the path of Hurricane Sandy,” his campaign said. The GOP presidential nominee was scheduled to attend a Tuesday event in Ohio dedicated to hurricane relief, but he has towalk a fine line, say experts, keeping his campaign going while avoiding any suggestion that he’s scoring points off the storm(which is no longer technically classified as a hurricane). “It’s a very difficult situation for the challenger to strike the right note to not look too political but to also [be] empathetic with the victims,” says Mary Kate Cary, a former speechwriter for President George H.W. Bush. How has the monster storm that hammered the Northeast made Romney’s final push toward next week’s election more difficult? Here, three obstacles it’s thrown in Romney’s path:

1. Romney has ceded the spotlight to Obama
Romney has been trying not to completely “cede the mantle of leadership to Obama,” say Jim Huhnhenn and Steve Peoples at The Associated Press. He has spoken by phone to officials at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Homeland Security Department, and the National Weather Service, and publicly warned those in the storm’s path to expect extensive damage. “In the competition for attention, Obama held the edge, however,” going on cable TV, live, to call for people to heed evacuation warnings and pull together. “Such is the advantage of incumbency, provided things don’t go wrong.”

2. This undermines Romney’s final pitch in Virginia and New Hampshire
Romney is tied with Obama nationally, but he still needs to eke out gains in a few critical swing states, says James Joyner at Outside the Beltway, if he hopes to collect the 270 electoral votes he needs to win. It’s “next to impossible to say how or whether the storm is going to impact [his] ability to persuade a relative handful of undecided voters” in the battlegrounds, but it’s distinctly possible that he could “lose the race because he’s unable to campaign in Virginia and New Hampshire in the final days.” On the other hand, he’s left with “an extra couple of days in Ohio,” which could be “a blessing in disguise” if it improves his chances of winning there.

3. The storm derailed Romney’s bid for Wisconsin
With Obama still favored in Ohio — the swing state many expect to decide next Tuesday’s election — Team Romney was making a compensatory play for the long-reliably blue state of Wisconsin. Now-post-tropical storm Sandy “may be a safe distance from Wisconsin,” says Matt Taylor at The Daily Beast, “but the Frankenstorm has upended Mitt Romney’s late push to claim [its] 10 electoral votes.” The GOP nominee “was compelled to ax an event in suburban Milwaukee, a GOP stronghold, Monday evening,” and his team “apparently decided to stop politicking with flooding, power outages, and even deaths on the horizon,” leaving Obama in command in Wisconsin, according to the latest polls.

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October 30, 2012 · 8:43 PM

Romney Trained Poll Watchers To Mislead Voters

What more will Mitt Romney do to steal this election?  Will the American people accept this behavior?  The press has given him a pass on almost all of his lies.  Now even they are fed up with Romney’s diabolical tactics and lies…

Addicting Info

For training Romney Poll Watchers in Wisconsin, of which 8 sessions have been held, the campaign produced this lovely little document to instruct their volunteers as to the proper procedure and the law:

The problem is, these instructions, and the associated training, is full of errors and omissions.

Romney-Volunteer-Observer-Training

From Page 5:

Any “person [who] has been convicted of treason, a felony, or bribery” isn’t eligible to vote.

Not only is this bad grammar, but it is incorrect. According to the state regulations once a person has served their sentence, their right to vote is automatically restored.

From Page 10:

If a handicapped voter is unable to come into the polls to vote, an assistant can deliver the ballot to the voter if the CEI verifies the elector’s proof of residency.

This is also not true. Under Wisconsin law the CEI does not have to verify the elector’s proof of residency.

The a tricky part is also found on Page 10:

Election Observers should not assist [voters].

This is the Romney campaign skirting the law, giving a judgment call on “should or should not” when in fact the law allows for voters to request assistance from anyone, including poll observers.

But the most disgusting is from pages 8 to 10, where they list acceptable identification, but leave a multitude of options off the list. The options they left off include:

  • letters from public schools
  • student loan papers
  • correspondence with a Native American tribe in Wisconsin
  • vehicle registration
  • food stamp correspondances (sic)
  • an affidavit from a public or private social service agency

Why does the Romney campaign engage in such easily verifiable deceptions? If a poll observer is found to be enforcing these illegal activities, it is the observer which will find themselves under arrest. And their only defense will be that the Romney campaign told them to do it. But, sadly, lies are what we have come to expect from the campaign of what once was considered a decent man.

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October 10, 2012 · 6:28 PM

The rarely seen, hard-to-execute flip-flop-flip

The Maddow Blog

Back in June, Mitt Romney offered an important insight into how he views economic policy.

“[President Obama] wants to hire more government workers,” Romney said. “He says we need more fireman, more policeman, more teachers. Did he not get the message of Wisconsin? The American people did. It’s time for us to cut back on government and help the American people.”

Right. It’ll “help the American people” just as soon as we allow more layoffs of school teachers and first responders. Why will the economy benefit when these workers are unemployed? Romney never got around to explaining that, but the larger point was hard to miss: the president believes the country would benefit from fewer teacher layoffs; Romney believes the opposite.

At least, that’s the way it seemed. Four months later, in last week’s debate, President Obama brought this up, noting, “Governor Romney doesn’t think we need more teachers. I do.”

The Republican responded, “I reject the idea that I don’t believe in great teachers or more teachers.” In other words, Romney no longer seems to agree with what he said in June.

That is, until yesterday, when Romney sat down with the editors of the Des Moines Register. AsSam Stein noted, the former governor seemed to revert back to his original stance, arguing, “He wants to hire more school teachers. We all like school teachers. It’s a wonderful thing. Typically, school teachers are hired by states and localities, not by the federal government. But hiring school teachers is not going to raise the growth of the U.S. economy over the next three-to-four years.”

First, as a matter of economic policy, hundreds of thousands of public education jobs have been lost in recent years, and saving those jobs would, in reality, not only help schools, students, families, but also have a meaningful economic impact. Romney resists this, but teaching is a real job involving a real paycheck. Teachers who are employed can then use that paycheck to purchase goods and services, pay bills, make investments, etc. When those teachers are laid off and federal officials let it happen, the workers withdraw from the marketplace and hurt the economy. Why Romney struggles to understand this is unclear.

Second, we rarely see flip-flop-flips, but Romney, if nothing else, is unique.

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September 28, 2012 · 12:05 AM

Tommy Thompson Promises To ‘Do Away With Medicare and Medicaid’

Crooks & Liars via TPM

After standing tall in support of Mitt Romney’s 47 percent comments, this secret video of Tommy Thompson promising TeaBirchers he’ll do away with the “rest of the entitlements” comes up. Oh, the things they say and how they wish this wasn’t the age of YouTube.

Meanwhile, Tammy Baldwin is running away from Thompson in the polls, even as Thompson continues to huddle with his pal Mitt.

Also, what is it with Republicans and PowerPoint presentations? Sheesh.

Update: After Tammy Baldwin smacked Thompson down over those comments, Thompson’s campaign issued what might be the most disingenuous statement ever, saying:

In a statement to TPM, the Thompson campaign responded by saying Baldwin “would rather lie and demagogue the issues than put forth a credible plan,” declaring that Thompson “actually provides solutions to our nation’s problems.”

“In this video, Thompson was making the case for reforming Medicare so that we can protect it for current seniors and preserve it for future generations,” his spokeswoman Lisa Boothe said. “That is evidenced by his comments at the end of the video where he says he wants people to have a choice to either stay on Medicare as it is or give people another option.”

Bircher Bullsh*t.

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September 16, 2012 · 7:02 PM

Liars Don’t Lead, They Mislead

Romney and Ryan.

Truthout

A leader is defined as a person who manages the process of social influence in which s/he honestly enlists the aid and support of others in the accomplishment of a common task. A liar is a person who intentionally delivers a false statement to another person in order to deceive that person. Liars don’t lead; they mislead.

Leadership was a common theme articulated throughout the Republican National Convention. Republicans contend that President Obama lacks the leadership necessary to move the country beyond the current economic crisis and does not possess the leadership necessary to navigate the treacherous international waters going forward. Republicans contend that former governor Mitt Romney and Rep. Paul Ryan (D-Wisconsin) possess the leadership qualities to effectively manage the economy and strengthen America’s position on the global stage.

There are honest, fact-based debates between President Obama’s supporters and detractors regarding his current record, leadership style, and negotiating skills. Many have questioned the president’s willingness to make concessions during budget and health care negotiations; his foreign policy decisions, including Guantanamo; the use of drones to perform bombing raids; and the assassination of Muammar Qaddafi.  The difference between legitimate debate and what was presented at the Republican National Convention is the utter lack of factual content by too many Republican speakers. They did not make misstatements, exaggerations, mistakes or errors. They lied.

Continue reading here…

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