Governor Scott Walker ally Randy Hopper (R-Fond du Lac) is up for recall.
Efforts to recall Republican State Senator Randy Hopper from Fon du Lac have reached another milestone, as organizers issue a call for volunteers to turn in any remaining petitions to be counted. Organizer Scott Dillman says he's sure they have enough signatures to trigger the recall, but he can't give exact figures yet. He says, processing all the information they've collected so far will take a week. They need 15,000 signatures to trigger the recall and he had originally set a goal of 20,000 by April first. He says he should have set that goal higher. Once Dillman tallies and submits his petition, a candidate will have to step up to run against hopper in the recall, which could happen by this summer.
Hopper is the class act whose 25-year-old aide was given a state job in the Department of Regulation & Licencing with over $11,000 of a pay hike from the last person to held the position. It's possible that she needed the pay increase, because her boyfriend, State Senator Randy Hopper, is now mooching off of her in Madison (casting doubt on whether he's serving his constituency in Fond du Lac). Also, with all the strict cuts that public employees are going to recieve under Governor Scott Walker, you can't blame a guy's mistress for needing a bit of extra cash.
Hopper's wife signed the recall petition, and is probably the reason Hopper's recall popped first. Considering that he only won election by 0.19% of the vote in 2008, there seems like a good chance that he's fucked, and not just by his mistress.
There is
some contention on the facts in this case.
Scott Dillman, a former Department of Corrections employee who is one of the campaign's coordinators, wouldn't say directly Tuesday that volunteers had collected the 15,269 signatures required to force the election. But he said that volunteers were planning a last push for signatures on election day next Tuesday, and that he's hoping that the total collected will be "closer to 30,000 than 15,000."
Graeme Zielinski, communications director for the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, took exception to the suggestion the recall had reached its goal. He reacted to a Journal Sentinel blog post about it by e-mailing that "your numbers are not accurate," but he wouldn't elaborate. The party has been unwilling to be specific about the number of signatures collected so far in the recall campaigns.
It appears that they're going for overkill. No kill like overkill, I suppose, but I just don't want the Democrats to get cocky here.
Sheila Hasdorf (R-New Richmond) is also a recall target.
Some are speculating that
"only about half" of the state senators up for recall will end up with enough signatures to actually go to a recall election. Interestingly, and possibly related, half of the senators up for recall are Republicans, and half are Democrats. To all accounts, while the Republicans are raising as much or more money than the Democrats, it's largely out-of-state money, and they have little in the way of community organizers [snerk] to come and oversee efforts to gather signatures.
If you've been only subjected to national media and have no idea why Wisconsin would start throwing out Republicans that they just put into power, see the now-locked
[Wisconsin Protests] thread.
Posts
Governor Walker is going to cancel the recall elections citing a lack of money!
Denying the legitimacy of the recall process (which I believe is enshrined in the state constitution) turns this from a recall election situation in to a torches and pitchforks situation.
I doubt even Walker would be so callously stupid to try that.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
They violated court orders to begin enacting the collective bargaining law, possibly pilling on more law violations in doing so.
I wouldn't put anything past them at this point.
They're openly disregarding a court order now, with the reason being that courts can't tell them what to do due to separation of powers.
He would absolutely try that.
PSN/Steam/NNID: SyphonBlue | BNet: SyphonBlue#1126
I couldn't believe they actually said that. So I went ahead and looked up it:
Walker will do anything he thinks he can get away with and, failing that, anything and everything that will benefit his corporate overlords until he gets tossed out. He knows that he'll have at least a year of selling off the state infrastructure before he can be recalled. It will take years to fix the damage Walker will have done. Look at the damage the Bush Administration did to the American government: we're still rooting out Liberty University graduate appointees and dealing with judges who are bought & paid for by the Republicans, despite Obama being a sane steward of the government.
Now, do they actually not know what separation or powers is, or is this just more willful disregard for the law?
PSN/Steam/NNID: SyphonBlue | BNet: SyphonBlue#1126
It's kind of like how Palin thinks her First Amendment rights are being violated when someone calls her out for saying something stupid. She has a 6 year old's concept of what "the right to freedom of speech" means.
The same thing is in play here, with separation of powers and the whole bill publishing thing. Being an elected official comes with no requirement to actually understand the laws in play, as the Wisconsin Republicans are ably demonstrating.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
I'd like to believe that an elected official, even a blatantly corrupt one knows why we have three branches of government and that he's just saying that to try and get idiots that actually don't know any better on their side but in this case, I just don't know. Fitzgerald just might be this stupid.
I'd like to believe that as well, which is why I couldn't believe anyone actually said that.
At the moment, it looks like any legal immigrant who has become/hopes to become a citizen knows more about how our government works than he does.
I don't think Fitz is an idiot. He's just learning from the big dogs like Boehner or McConnell how to change the narrative by simply insisting that one's opponents are wrong without bothering to back it up with facts (because if you have to cite facts, you're conceding that the issue isn't just completely open-and-shut with them in the wrong). If you sound like you're sure of yourself, it goes a long way in convincing idiots that you're "right."
So how long until college students start using the FOIA to demand that professors give them access to test answers?
Rachel Maddow had a great segment last night about how Republicans keep saying that they're all about small government until it's time to read a professor's e-mail after he points out the flaws in your tyrannical regime. Apparently they're doing this in Michigan; they want to search the college e-mail for words like "Madison" or "Maddow."
Yeah. He's that dumb. At this point I think I might be smarter than him. He might not go down when it's his turn to face the recall petitions, but damned if I'm not gonna try.
But hey. As it looks, they might just knock off early after Tuesday and start reallocating resources. Leave any additional signature-gathering to the people who can't make it to some other district, everyone else chips in some place where they need the extra bodies. One down, seven to go.
Meanwhile, from what I'm seeing, the competing (!) efforts against Democrat Dave Hansen are basically cannibalizing each other. That's just slapstick. A house signs one recall effort, then the other one shows up, they say 'I've already signed, sorry', enough houses where that happens and they just take out each other with Hansen just standing there clutching his gut laughing.
Anyway, the Walker administration finally suspended implementation of the collective bargaining law in deference to the judge who ordered it (twice). "We thought you meant you just wanted it done faster so you wouldn't have to hear about it anymore, Your Honor. Our bad."
...
I think that even Steve Perry would agree that, sometimes, you should just stop believing.
The 'Republican Party of Dane County' was quoted on Colbert tonight regarding their press release about the third court order. (Spoiler: they don't agree)
http://www.danegop.org/latestnews.aspx?ID=234
The ticker on the side is advertising a lecture on "Establishing legal personhood for pre-born children"
Which brings me to my question: Have our Wisconsinite forumers been showing up, speaking at, and covertly trolling these people at 'Pints and Politics' every month; gradually twisting their rhetoric into something truly insane?
If no: They still need a guest speaker for June.
Assuming those recalled get replaced by Democrats
Snerk.
I think that this is the best news. If they're pulling off 20K signatures in less than a month in these singular districts, it brings some hope that they may be able to get the half a million necessary to recall Walker next year.
Huh. I'm not sure what "ask for more time to minimize the number of special elections" means. "A couple" recall elections, as in two, has no chance of un-fucking the state. We need three, and not just three recall elections, three changes of power... so, depending on how nuts the various districts are, three to eight are needed.
I would think that since they have enough support to get the sigs it would mean they can count on those same people getting out and voting for the opposition
I hope anyway
Oh yeah, that makes sense. Since there's some rules on specifically how long between the filing, certification, and election it is, they might need to fudge it a little if they get the signatures in and counted at different times.
It seems plausible, but I don't want to assume success. Overestimating the amount of work needed to take out Republicans is basically the only way the Democrats have succeeded in the past few years.
This seems like very good news for the judicial challenge against the budget repair bill.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
And that official filing means the workload for Kapanke's district can be moved into other districts where the extra bodies are needed, the fourth- or fifth-choice districts.
I can safely assume they've gone over the sig lists a couple times before filing to make sure they're not Mickey Mouse'd, right?