"Your safety. It's no longer a spectator sport. I need you in the game. But are you ready?"

"With officers laid off and furloughed, simply calling 911 and waiting is no longer your best option. You could beg for mercy from a violent criminal, hide under the bed, or you can fight back. But are you prepared? Consider taking a certified safety course in handling a firearm so you can defend yourself until we get there. You have a duty to protect yourself and your family. We're partners now. Can I depend on you?"

Says Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke Jr. in a new radio ad (which you can play here).

Predictable pushback. From the office of Tom Barrett (the Mayor of Milwaukee who challenged Gov. Scott Walker in the recall election and lost):

"Apparently, Sheriff David Clarke is auditioning for the next Dirty Harry movie."

And from Jeri Bonavia, executive director of Wisconsin Anti-Violence Effort:

"What (Clarke's) talking about is this amped up version of vigilantism.... I don't know what his motivations are for doing this. But I do know what he's calling for is dangerous and irresponsible and he should be out there saying this is a mistake."

If it all comes down to Wisconsin...

It's 7 a.m. here in Wisconsin, which might just make the difference in the Electoral College, with our measly but magnificent 10 votes. I've seen various permutations of the Electoral College map — here, create your own map — and it's easy to see how Wisconsin could put Romney over the top even if he loses Ohio and Pennsylvania and Iowa.

Air Force One touched down in Madison at 2:30 a.m., and a small group of people were lined up on State Street at 6, but the line has grown in the last hour. Madison gave Obama his largest crowd of the campaign when he was here a month ago, but he was here a month ago, and that was in the afternoon in the middle of campus. Now, it's early Monday morning, a time when young people are difficult to rouse from their warm beds, and, speaking of warmth, it's 30° in Madison right now. It was a long wait in the rain for the campus speech last month.

And people must remember that you don't just get to see Obama and that other guy you might care about. (Do the young folk care about seeing Bruce Springsteen?) You have to put up with the local politicos — the mayor and so forth. Meanwhile, it's all on TV.... and has been for months. (Years?) The reason to go is not so much to see, but to be seen. Lend your body to the photograph of Obama with the Wisconsin Capitol looming in the background. As it looms, you may wonder, where was Obama when you were marching and chanting and drumming last year protesting Scott Walker? Where was Obama last spring when you dragged Scott Walker into a recall election? He expressed tepid support from afar, but declined to set foot in Wisconsin, even when he was right at the border in Minneapolis/Chicago.

Ironically, that recall election forced Republicans to develop their ground game in Wisconsin, and that's exactly what may push Mitt Romney over the top tomorrow. Here's RNC chairman Reince Priebus, yesterday on "State of the Union":

[The Democrats] haven’t been able to win in Wisconsin for a long time. They claim that the Obama machine was out during the Walker recall. We basically crushed them in Wisconsin. I have seen firsthand the difference between Obama’s rhetoric on their ground game and the reality, and the reality is they’re not as good as they think they are....

When you see that Wisconsin State Capitol in the background in today's Obama photo-ops, remember all that it symbolizes: an immense GOP victory in 2010, a huge and rude months-long uprising of the left end of the Democratic Party's target constituency (shunned by Obama himself) in 2011, and, in 2012, a decisive victory in the recall election for GOP Governor Scott Walker. What about all those Democratic voters splayed out around the GOP-dominated Capitol building? Hello? This is Madison, Wisconsin. The state Capitol building is always surrounded by Democrats. Every day, every month, every year. Madison does not control election outcomes in Wisconsin. In fact, there are an awful lot of people in Wisconsin whose idea of Madison is: This is not what Wisconsin looks like. And the people of Madison return the sentiment. We've been amusing ourselves with the saying "Madison is X square miles surrounded by reality" for a long, long time.

Obama will win by a landslide in Madison, but Madison — as we all know and have been telling ourselves for decades — is not reality.

You may be able to look out your downtown Madison window and see Barack Obama and Bruce Springsteen, but don't you dare.

"The counter terrorism teams have to be cognizant of movement in windows for obvious reasons... Please cooperate with their needs and stay away from those windows. We, too, would like to watch, but we need to avoid the urge."

Yeah, when Obama appeared right outside my office window — just a few weeks ago — I got email telling me that if I looked out my window I could expect a visit from the police. Then they just shut down the whole law school building for the entire day and closed all the blinds. They hung a giant building-sized curtain all down one side of a dorm that had a view of the central mall where the President appeared.

And now he's coming back to the City of Obama Love — Madison, Wisconsin — to create a final burst of glowing adoration on the morning before Election Day, and our town is thrown into disarray once again for photo-op purposes, because we are the fresh-faced folk who still gaze upon him with awe. There are the young people — whose professors will undoubtedly free them from classes once again — and the aging liberals — who will surely feel the pull of the lugubrious dronings of Mr. Springsteen.

City employees have also been warned. "Offices facing MLK Jr., Blvd. and Wilson Street will need to be locked and vacant with the blinds drawn," Mayor Paul Soglin wrote in an email Friday afternoon to staff and city alders. "Adherence to this directive is imperative as the health and safety of our employees may be negatively impacted if we fail to enforce this directive," he added.

Adherence to this directive is imperative as the health and safety of our employees may be negatively impacted if we fail to enforce this directive.... jeez, he's talking like a robot! What are they threatening to do to us if we look out a window? Negatively impact us....

We're told the city streets downtown will begin closing Sunday morning, a full day before the appearance. People are asked to amass at the top of State Street and form 2 lines which will proceed in opposite directions around the Capitol Square to the site of the rally (which is right in front of the City-County Building, the place you go to early-vote). Picture all 4 sides of the Capitol Square streaming with political people. A fabulous photo-op, which might remind us of the big Wisconsin protests of 2011 — you know, those anti-Scott Walker demonstrations which Barack Obama steered way clear of. He wasn't there for the demonstrations or to boost Walker's opponent in the recall election last spring. Obama wasn't there for the Madison lefty-liberals when they needed him, but they'll be there — presumably! — when he needs them.

Given the hasty plans for the rally, Lindskoog [a downtown parking manager] is anticipating gridlock and scarce parking will greet anyone who ventures downtown after 6 a.m. Monday. The crowd, he says, is anticipated to hit 50,000.

"We're hoping people treat this like a snow day," he said with a laugh.

Ha ha. Like a snow day. Like some sort of natural disaster that shuts a city down. That's always so fun. And don't come downtown, anybody, because it will be a nightmare, but be sure to come downtown, everybody, because there's a fabulous festival unreeling in our town again, our town, the President's favorite town, where he loves the way you love him. Now, smile for the cameras, Madison people. You're the chosen scenery once again!

The Romney/Ryan decision to fight hard in Wisconsin.

A Republican presidential candidate hasn't won here since Reagan beat Mondale (in 1984), but Republicans have won the governorship twice in the last 2 years — there was a recall election — and they won the last Senate race and are on track to pick up the other Senate seat. And so we are about to get all the TV ads and so forth that recognize our status as a true battleground state.

Mary Spicuzza has some good detail here:

"There’s something going on in Wisconsin. The grass-roots army that we have built in Wisconsin, they’re crushing it out there," said Rick Wiley, political director of the Republican National Committee and former executive director of the state GOP. "It’s a state that has truly turned a corner. It’s ripe."

The work Gov. Scott Walker and his supporters did during the recall could benefit the GOP ground game — political shorthand for the volunteers who help turn out voters and promote a candidacy — during the next two months.

It was a terribly foolish decision for the Walker haters to go for the recall, but I doubt if these people dare to look straight at the reality that they may be the reason why the GOP is able to get over the top in the presidential election.

"Walker showed that the GOP can come with a ground game, it’s going to help Romney," said Joe Heim, UW-La Crosse political science professor. "It has added to the enthusiasm among Republican voters."

And it has tired out the Democrats. But Spicuzza found an Obama spokesman — Ben LaBolt —  to say "The truth is the recall has had a motivating effect on our side as well." Okay, let's see how that "motivating effect" works against a "grass-roots army" that is "crushing it out there."

[T]he Obama campaign is planning frequent visits in the coming two months. Obama has made several stops in Wisconsin in recent years, during his campaign and after taking office: in Green Bay, Madison, Racine, Milwaukee and Manitowoc. His last visit was in February in Milwaukee....

[Charles Franklin, director of the Marquette Law School Poll] said the Green Bay and Fox Valley areas will be key. Obama did well there in 2008, but Bush won there in 2000 and 2004. He said Wausau and the area north of it, and the southwest corner of the state, also will be important.

"A Democrat cannot win the state by winning Madison and Milwaukee, and losing Milwaukee suburbs and Green Bay, Wausau, Eau Claire and Chippewa Falls," Franklin said. "When Wisconsin Democrats have won statewide, they’ve won those areas."

Again, the Republicans have that grass-roots army they built during the recall and they’re crushing it out there. And let's remember that Obama failed to stop by the state to help out the Democrats in that recall. He might have stirred his Wisconsin people up last spring, when they really needed him and he could have made a big impact, but, instead, he conspicuously disappointed them — seemingly taunting them by doing fundraisers just across the border. He only tweeted his support for the Democrat. Presumably, he kept his distance because he knew Tom Barrett would lose, and he didn't want to look ineffectual.

And speaking of taunting us, Obama keeps taking shots at the Green Bay Packers — e.g., “I generally don’t interact with Packers — except when I’m in Wisconsin.”

Tommy Thompson is 11 points ahead of Tammy Baldwin in the Senate race in Wisconsin.

Tommy didn't win Tuesday's GOP primary by much. The old man had to fight off a handsome newcomer — Eric Hovde — and a lot of negative advertising was thrown around. But he's nevertheless way out in front of Baldwin already. This was utterly predictable, as is his ultimate victory over Baldwin in November.

The excitement in Wisconsin will have to be of the presidential political kind. Obama will have to show up here, and I wonder how much he will bother to help the predictable loser Baldwin. Remember, Obama did not stop by Wisconsin to try to help the Democratic challenger to Governor Scott Walker in the recall election last June. I think he didn't want his lack of magic to show and knew Tom Barrett was going to lose. But now Obama faces his last election — or so he says.* The polls showing Baldwin's dreary prospects are and will be much worse than what the public saw about Barrett. (But I believe Obama was looking at internal polls that show Barrett doing far worse than what the public saw before the recall election.)

Now, Obama needs to come to Wisconsin. These 10 electoral votes matter... a lot. They could determine the outcome of the presidential election. He must come to Wisconsin. Will he stand by Baldwin and promote her lost cause? It's a risk! It's not just the problem of getting loser on him, which we know from the recall he has an aversion to. It's that Baldwin is a lefty liberal, whose career has been based in Madison, and Obama needs to win voters from those parts of the state he's avoided in the past. He likes to show up for adoration in Madison and Milwaukee, but he won't win Wisconsin that way, and showing up in Madison/Milwaukee pushing Tammy Baldwin is not the way to talk to the rest of Wisconsin.

The rest of Wisconsin — including many Democrats — are going to vote for Tommy Thompson. Obama must talk to these people. Think about it:

Tommy has coattails!

Mitt Romney might win the presidency riding on Tommy's coattails.

It's all about Wisconsin, baby.
_______________________________

* I'd like to see him show his commitment to American politics by running for Governor or the Senate after he leaves the presidency. (But in/from which state? Is he going to go live in Illinois when he's done being President? I doubt it.)

$137+ million spent on Wisconsin recall elections.

$81 million of it was blown trying to oust Governor Walker.

What a waste! Is anyone up for the new elections, the normal elections, this fall?

Scott Walker on the Romney campaign: "I think there’s a lot of caution."

"I think the mistake that they’ve made is the feeling like it can just be a referendum on the president... It’s certainly a part of it for any incumbent; it’s got to be a referendum on, do you like or dislike, not just the president, but his policies … but there’s got to be something more. People don’t just vote somebody out; they’ve got to vote somebody in."

This was on "Morning Joe" and reported in Politico, which mentions that Walker "recently survived a recall election," but not that one of the reasons he won was that his opponents tried to make it a referendum on him.

The Wisconsin governor... cited Boston’s “big dig,” a massive, problem-laden infrastucture project as a time when Romney “came in, rolled up his sleeves and said, ‘I’m taking control.’... I’d like to see him do that,” he added.

Democrats lose their majority in the Wisconsin senate!

After the Democrats just edged out the Republicans by winning one closely fought seat in last month's recall elections:

State Sen. Tim Cullen, D-Janesville, said Tuesday he plans to leave the Democratic caucus and may become an independent....

Cullen, who was among the 14 Democratic senators who left the state during the historic protests at the Capitol in 2011 but had sought compromise with GOP governor Scott Walker on collective bargaining, said he was insulted by not being named chairman of any Senate committees after the Democrats regain control of that chamber.

There are many paths to power. When one is cut off, another opens up.

Meade said: "They're all such sore losers!"

ADDED: This is being discussed over at the Isthmus forum (where Meade participates). I was interested in this remark by jjoyce:

Cullen has a right to be angry. He could have tubed the whole 14 thing easily. Some reports say he wanted to.

Now, "the whole 14 thing" refers to the Great Fleebagging of 2011. But "tubed"? I had to look it up in the Urban Dictionary. "Tube" is a mean way to say "vagina." Interestingly, "tubed" means "fucked." (I think it's interesting because sex slang doesn't normally put the vagina in the aggressively active role.) So Cullen... he coulda been a fleebag fucker.

Romney and Obama are running lots of ads — but not in the battleground state of Wisconsin.

There's the idea that they're leaving us alone to give us "respite" while we get over our "recall hangover."

How much taxpayer money is being spent moving Wisconsin state senators' offices around after the recall election?

Although Governor Scott Walker won his recall election, one state senate seat shifted from Republican to Democrat, and that created a Democratic majority, which triggered massive office moves in the Capitol building. Although it's summer vacation time and the majority is likely to shift back to the Republicans after the November elections, "it appears roughly one-third of the 33 senators are going to move to different offices."

There’s the cost of moving phone lines, which the last time I wrote an article about this topic cost the state $41 an hour, plus the cost to re-letter office doors and change the locks on the doors....

Russ Feingold on the Wisconsin recall: "I wouldn't have won either."

The audience gasped.

These were 500 people at First Unitarian Society who'd showed up for a talk  organized by the Interfaith Coalition for Worker Justice of South Central Wisconsin — on "the role of interfaith communities in the labor movement."

Feingold said that interfaith groups will play a key role in healing the current partisan divide in the state. He said he saw that dynamic in action while in the Senate.

"Whenever we had a really tough fight," said Feingold, "we'd bring in the clergy. They seemed to just briefly lift us from our egos, our own infighting politics. They seemed to momentarily elevate us to talk more about fundamental values that underlie the political effort in this country."

"Gov. Walker has $1.6 million in the bank 'giving him a strong start toward a 2014 re-election race.'"

"Thanks a lot, recall suckers!"

Racine recall recount ends with the Democrats winning their 1-person majority in the Wisconsin senate.

Subject to challenge by the Republican Wanggaard and, more importantly, subject to the November elections when half the senate is up for grabs with the districts as redrawn by the erstwhile GOP majority.

About that recall recount in Racine.

The majority in the Wisconsin senate hangs on the result. Can we trust it?

The recount process has uncovered a series of stunning revelations regarding ballot security.

That's MacIver, which might tend to exaggerate.

President Obama should have been reading SCOTUSblog, not watching TV.

"Standing with White House chief of staff Jack Lew and looking at a television in the “Outer Oval” featuring a split screen of four different networks, the president saw graphics on the screens of the first two cable news networks to break the news — CNN and Fox News Channel — announcing, wrongly, that he had lost."

I was reading the SCOTUSblog live blog with CNN on in the background:

CNN is getting it wrong, if SCOTUSblog is right. They're headlining "Individual Mandate Struck Down."...

From SCOTUSblog. "The bottom line: the entire ACA is upheld, with the exception that the federal government's power to terminate states' Medicaid funds is narrowly read." From CNN: Blitzer says "let's take a deep breath... if you're watching this on Twitter... momentous... more information...."

CNN was fumbling and blathering. I guess they have to fill every second of real time. A live blog seems as though it's real-time, but the participants have the ability to read something and study it without writing anything. But that's not enough of an excuse for the TV news failure. They need one person to talk, but several others could be quickly reading parts of the opinion and ready to go on camera when they have something to say.

I'm still annoyed at CNN for wasting my time — and playing with my emotions — back on June 5th when the polls closed in the Wisconsin recall election and they were insisting that the race was too close to call. It's razor close. After an hour of such hand-wringing, they call it for Walker, and in the end, he wins by 7 percentage points.

Fox News got it wrong too, it should be noted. Both today and on June 5th.

Did the Democrats give up on class warfare?

Jonathan Martin (at Politico) says they did. He notes that Occupy Wall Street has evanesced and that Obama conspicuously avoided participating in the Wisconsin recall election.

Labor unions hoped to turn the Wisconsin recall election into a rallying cause for their ailing movement. But a Democratic president couldn’t be dragged off the sidelines for the fight.

And let me add that even the Democratic candidate in that election avoided talking about labor union matters. Tom Barrett talked — with stunning blandness — about a restoration of civility and working together.

When you get a few paragraphs into the long article, you'll see it's mostly complaints about the dynamics of campaign finance with lots of quotes from people Martin counts among the few "unapologetic populists" left in the party. But there's this nice summary:

*The political infrastructure doesn’t exist. Class-based partisan appeals by Democrats in the early and mid-20th century were typically supported by a robust and well-organized labor movement. That doesn’t exist in any similar form these days.

*Even populist politicians need money. Conspiracy theorists who believe campaign contributions drive the agenda aren’t altogether wrong. It is virtually impossible to be a successful national Democrat without relying heavily on business interests, including the financial industry, for campaign funds.

*The president, a man comfortable in elite circles, is not temperamentally inclined for the kind of sustained, rough-edged partisan combat that true populist politics requires. So, while he is tempted by populist appeals on some days, he often turns ambivalent and changes his message the next.

*Most important of all, lots of Democrats simply do not support populism, on either ideological or stylistic grounds. Many upscale Democrats believe that Washington needs less combat, not more, and populist messages strike them as irrelevant at best, demagogic at worst. Even some working-class voters have their assets in the stock market, because of their 401(k)s and IRAs, making even the most traditional of Democrats believe their interests are more in line with Wall Street than opposed.

What if you support a political candidate and his campaign — without your permission — sticks its yard sign in your yard?

Oh, how painful it was for Adam Schabow when — twice! — Tom Barrett's people stuck their sign in his yard! He hates Scott Walker, but the presumption and the intrusion was just very horrible for him.

"I wanted a 'Recall Walker' sign. 'Cause mine got stolen a couple of weeks earlier. The whole thing was very convenient for me. But they didn't know that. So they shouldn't've been messin' around on my lawn."

Even liberals say get off my lawn.

IN THE COMMENTS: Pogo wrote:

His lawn?
"His" lawn??

There is nobody in this country who got a lawn on his own — nobody.
You grew some grass out there? Good for you.

But I want to be clear. You moved your grass seed on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired lawn care workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your house because of police-forces and fire-forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything on your lawn — and hire someone to protect against this — because of the work the rest of us did.

Your lawn?
Hardly!!

At the AFSCME convention, "any serious consideration of a fundamental change in strategy..."

"— something that many labor and political experts say the union badly needs to win more public support."

Judging from the talk on the convention floor, one would hardly know that they had experienced a huge defeat this month in their effort to recall Wisconsin’s governor, or that they faced lawmakers and voters across the country who have grown increasingly unsympathetic to public sector workers....

At most they're saying, they lost in Wisconsin because they were outspent, says Gary Chaison, a professor of industrial relations at Clark University, but "It would have been much more encouraging if they said, ‘We lost because we are out of touch with the public.’ They don’t understand that in hard times, everyone must sacrifice."

Numerous studies have shown that wages for public sector and private sector workers are not far different. One analysis found that government workers with college degrees tend to have lower wages than private sector workers with similar educations, while those without college degrees tend to do better than their private sector counterparts.

But public employees generally have more generous health and pension plans. In a report this month, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said state and local workers averaged $26.85 in wages an hour, with compensation totaling $41.16 an hour when pensions and other benefits are included.

Designing the pay package like that is a way to keep the public from seeing how generous it is. What happened in Wisconsin was a new transparency. Something most people hadn't noticed became the focal point, as Scott Walker and the GOP legislature selected, for budget cutting purposes, exactly the item that people hadn't really noticed. It wasn't about cutting salaries or firing public workers, so when they protested, they were yelling about something that looked rather lavish to other citizens... which made them sound out of touch and entitled.

“I wouldn’t write off labor unions just yet. Their obituary has been written frequently over the past 70 years,” said Harley Shaiken, a professor of labor studies at the University of California, Berkeley. However, “the status quo for them is untenable,” he said. “Unions will require imaginative, bold leadership going forward.”

But at the convention, AFSCME voted for Lee Saunders as their new president, and he's saying:

“We have to be as politically active as we can possibly be in the 2012 elections at the national, state, local, school district level because there are a lot of people out there who want to hurt this union and who want to hurt you,” he said. “We have to be organized to fight back.”

Does that sound like imaginative, bold leadership going forward?

"Ann suggests that the Supreme Court striking down the law might help Obama's political fortunes."

"Glenn [Loury] disputes this, while observing that conservatives have certainly benefited over the years from the Court's pro-abortion rulings. They discuss the uproar over Massachusetts Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren's Native American ancestry, and, invoking the career of Justice Clarence Thomas, debate the politics of affirmative action. Responding to the failed attempt to recall Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, Ann thinks her formerly blue state is turning redder by the day. Glenn defends and Ann criticizes efforts to promote public employment during this recession."

Here's the whole 40-minute discussion:



IN THE COMMENTS: Chip S. said:

I was surprised that Loury defended Warren so much.

His career exemplifies what's best about affirmative action: Making an extra effort to find people with potential who would otherwise be overlooked.

Hers exemplifies the worst aspects of affirmative action: A cynical numbers game that doesn't benefit anyone whose light is actually hidden under a bushel.

As Glenn tells his own story — growing up poor on the south side of Chicago — he would be someone a law school admissions committee would pick out for multiple factors and not a simple race-balancing, box-checking approach to affirmative action. And unlike Elizabeth Warren and other individuals with a claim to some Native American ancestry, Glenn does not have the power to check and uncheck the box depending on whether or not an advantage is available. He can't be creative about his conception of himself when it comes to race.

"I felt most of the comments that people posted [on Althouse] were fair and were constructive and fair criticisms. After all, I did put myself out there."

Says Adam Schabow, whom we talked about here and here, and who calls this blog "a conservative but reasonably fair, good-natured website."

(The quote, at the first link, begins at about 3 minutes.)

Schabow is the guy with the YouTube series "Video a Day Until the Walker Recall," — which included a song called "The War Against Milwaukee and Madison —  and who, on recall election night, emoted lengthily on camera, saying things like: "The end of the U.S.A. as we know it just happened... democracy died tonight." [UPDATE: Sorry, I misread my own old post. Another guy said the "democracy died" quote. Schabow's election night video was sad, but different.]

I think we were pretty nice to Schabow. Is "lambasted" fair? In the new video, he goes on to talk about the radio talk-show guy Charlie Sykes directing people to his video and some truly mean homophobic-style comments that he got because of that. Thanks for not connecting my blog to that kind of thing.



I don't know if Adam Schabow realizes it, but Althouse has been a gay-friendly blog since its inception in January 2004 and some of its most notable commenters over the years have been gay guys. (I don't think the lesbians like me so much — a political thing? — but there's been at least one great lesbian commenter.)

Schabow has a blog site here, but he's only got 2 posts, a week apart, and they simply contain his videos, which look like they are going to be weekly, so it's not really what I'd call a blog, not that I have an objection to videographers setting up an attractive blog shell to display their videos. The first video is the one at the first link in this post. The second one, which went up today is called "Vaginas, Shitty Job Numbers and Shitty Pet Owners"... so it seems he's moving on from his period of mourning the democracy that Scott Walker murdered.

Scroll to 10:20 to see Billy the Dog.