We know now which prevailing wage concerns Scot Ross

The organization with the wonderfully fascist-sounding name, One Wisconsin Now, a self-admitted partisan organization, sent out this "urgent appeal" from Scot Ross this morning:

james:
I wasn't going to email you today, but last night during the budget debate Assembly Republicans tried to kill the state budget's prevailing wage plan -- and we need your help more than ever.

You and I know how important the stakes are. And so do our brothers and sisters who have suffered from wage rate violations. Just last year, the state found wage violations at over 35 percent of its on-site investigations. That's money out of the pockets of working men and women and out of our local economies.

Help us keep up the fight for prevailing wage, by clicking here and making a one-time, online contribution to One Wisconsin Now for $20, $45, $75, $100 -- whatever you can afford today. We've got powerful forces against us, but we can win.

I don't know why he didn't want to e-mail me today. Everyone else is e-mailing me.

But at least we know which prevailing wage Ross is fighting for - his.

The One Wisconsin Now contortionist act

This is just classic. Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Shirley Abrahamson raked in over $11,000 in donations from members of a law firm with a malpractice case before the court. Abrahamson did not disclose the donations to the parties involved in the case.

Abrahamson has not disclosed the donations from members of the firm, Cannon & Dunphy, to parties in the case or recused herself. Her campaign acknowledged she went to a fundraiser with those and other supporters but said that wouldn't affect her decision.

Nor is this the only time Abrahamson had her hand in the case-pending cookie jar.

In all, lawyers with cases pending before the seven-member court have donated more than $30,000 to Abrahamson's campaign since August, according to a review by The Associated Press. The lawyers -- nearly 30 in all -- made donations ranging from $25 to $5,000.

The donations are legal, but some watchdogs say their acceptance creates the perception of favoritism. One group is pushing the court to require justices to recuse themselves in cases involving parties who donate $1,000 or more to get them elected.

Interestingly, One Wisconsin Now is pushing to have some state supreme court justices recuse themselves from a case. In that case, OWN is claiming that even expenditures on issue-ads independent of the justice's campaign are sufficient grounds for recusal.

Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce has already made it known how it would like the Wisconsin Supreme Court to rule.

And who can forget the millions of dollars WMC spent supporting corporate-friendly and ethically-challenged judges Michael Gableman and Annette Ziegler?

One Wisconsin Now has even launched a petition drive to ask for Gableman's and Ziegler's recusal. However, notice that One Wisconsin Now has also indicated how it would like the court to rule but has not asked Abrahamson to recuse herself from the same case despite their activity on her behalf. Nor have they asked Abrahamson to recuse herself from the malpractice case involving Cannon & Dunphy. Nor have they asked Abrahamson from recusing herself from any case where she has received donations from those with cases pending before the state supreme court.

That's because One Wisconsin Now is not interested in defending any principle or standard of conduct. (Of course, we knew that when the ethically challenged Scot Ross was picked to lead them.) They are not even interested in the law. Their only interest is power, pushing their political philosophy by any means necessary, regardless of the moral and intellectual contortions in which they force themselves to engage.

Revisiting Oswald, Scot Ross, and Judge Koschnick

In Friday's Waukesha Freeman, Scot Ross of the organization with the Fascist-sounding name, One Wisconsin Now, attempts to take issue with my January 22nd Waukesha Freeman column, “Supremely different.” In that column I argue,

The concern should be less about Koschnick’s defense of a criminal {Ted Oswald} as a defense attorney than whether Koschnick would be a liberal jurist who would invent law as Abrahamson did in the Knapp case. It is clear that he would not, and perhaps that is why the prosecutor in the Oswald case, former Waukesha County District Attorney Paul Bucher, has endorsed Koschnick.

Ross, trudges out the old charge, hypocrisy, and summons forth a terribly incomplete and out of context quote from a blog post I wrote during the Gableman campaign.

On the subject of public defenders running for judge, the full quote:

I think it's fair to remind the voters that Butler was a public defender. Here's an ugly little secret. People don't like defense lawyers unless they need one. Then they're thanking whatever deity is at hand. Now, I like defense lawyers. I like all lawyers unless they're sitting on committees trying to control an election or, even worse, sitting on an election board. But I'm the exception. Most people root for the prosecution. Why do you think Law and Order is so popular? Do you think it would still be so popular if the public defenders ran circles around Arthur Branch?

If being a public defender was popular with the public, there would be more of them on the public payroll and they would be paid more.

I even think it's fair to run an ad that reminds the voters what kind of people the public defender defended as part of his career path. Heck, if I were Darrin Schmitz (Gableman's campaign manager), I'd pull out the whole portfolio and ask at what point did Butler no longer want to be a public defender. After this murderer? After this rapist?

If you don't like it, don't choose becoming a public defender as a career path.

Ironically, the quote comes from a post criticizing Butler’s opponent. Clearly I don’t have a philosophical objection to public defenders becoming a judge, or even a Supreme Court Justice. The comment was an understanding and explanation of the campaign tactic.

It also does not contradict what I wrote in the column, where I discuss the Oswald case at length.

When Koschnick was still a public defender, he was assigned Waukesha’s most notorious murderer, Ted Oswald. Oswald, along with his father, was convicted of killing Waukesha police Capt. James Lutz as he fled a bank robbery in 1994.

Writing in The Freeman, Belling accused Koschnick of trying to help Oswald "get away with murdering a cop" by claiming Oswald was controlled by his father. Left-wing blogs and One Wisconsin Now agree the case should hurt Koschnick, arguing it’s hypocritical for the judge to run a "tough on crime" campaign.

It’s a little more complicated than either would make the issue.

Koschnick was assigned the case, and his defense was designed to get his client convicted of a lesser charge, second-degree murder. The penalty would have been 60 years instead of life in prison. A far cry from arguing Oswald should "get away with murdering a cop."

Sorry to disappoint Ross, but since I did not “go apoplectic” over Butler, I can hardly be expected to “go apoplectic” over Koschnick, especially when it was clear from my column that Koschnick was assigned the case and the prosecutor in the case has endorsed him.

Why the unwarranted hypocrisy charge? Because it’s a way of saying, “Ignore this person. He’s a hypocrite.” Hypocrisy is the ultimate crime enhancer, and the punishment is ostracizing. Sleeping with a teenage girl is criminal. The rock star that sings about sleeping with hundreds of women continues to sell more song downloads. The televangelist is driven from the public stage in shame. Ross is hoping to silence conservative critics of his favored candidate, Justice Abrahamson.

It’s the only tack Ross has. Ross cannot defend Abrahamson from the charge of judicial activism. In discussing the Knapp case, Ross would rather focus on the “bloody shoes” than on how it took two tries to resolve the “bloody shirt” evidence. How Abrahamson was overturned by the US Supreme Court, only to invent another way of suppressing the evidence, one not mentioned in her earlier ruling. How Abrahamson was just throwing reasons up to justify her previously staked-out position, the very definition of judicial activism. If Ross tried to explain it, the public would turn against his candidate.

Politics makes strange bedfellows, and in this case Ross finds himself in bed with Mark Belling. (I hope Belling doesn’t catch an unexplainable rash.) Belling’s position on the Oswald case and Koschnick’s past as a public defender is understandable, even if I don’t agree. But surely Ross and his allies are not suddenly critical of the idea that a public defender could ever graduate to the bench, or perhaps become a Supreme Court Justice? Then why bring the Oswald case up repeatedly? To what end is Ross pursuing, except to force the connection in the minds of the voters?

But then, that would be hypocritical of Ross, no?

Killing the death tax

Fred Dooley at Real Debate Wisconsin is sponsoring a petition to stop the death tax from rising from the grave. The petition is online.

One Wisconsin Now (a really fascist sounding name, isn't it?) has launched a petition effort of their own to raise this killer zombie.

"Wisconsin will not allow the legislature to slash programs for the poor, elderly and disabled to protect a massive tax break for the state's next Paris Hilton," said {Scot Ross, Executive Director of One Wisconsin Now}. "These tax breaks for the super-rich started this year and if we have a budget shortfall, they need to end now."

Ross, of course, was the poster child for the Assembly Democrats' role in the Caucus Scandal. Perhaps he's concerned that state funding of legal help for former Democratic aides might be in jeopardy.

But surely his class-warfare rhetoric, aside from being old and tired, is out of place? After all, to solve Wisconsin's long-term economic problems, we should be encouraging as many of the Paris Hilton set, not to mention the Kohls and Cudahys, to settle in Wisconsin. Wealth preservation and encouragement of wealth growth is the path to prosperity. Even as Lt. Governor Barbara Lawton is encouraging Hollywood to bring their movie-making industry to Wisconsin, surely we would want to put out the welcome sign: "Bring us your entrepeneurial, your rich, your captains of industry yearning to be free of those wanting to destroy wealth to fund short-term desires."

As for Ms. Hilton, I know a realtor who has a nice starter home in New Berlin for sale, as well as a blogger looking to sell a condo in downtown Waukesha.

Tell it to the kids who will have no school

On the eve of hundreds of students, parents and teachers coming to Madison to tell the story of the Wisconsin Virtual Academy to the members of the state legislature, One Wisconsin Now decides to attempt to smear the member of the state legislature that has created a bill to save the school.

Assembly Education Committee Chair Rep. Brett Davis (R-Oregon) will hold a public hearing today on a bill he has authored that will benefit operators of Wisconsin virtual schools including K12, Inc., the Virginia-based for-profit company behind the Wisconsin Virtual Academy, and whose top executive and senior staff contributed to Davis's last campaign.

"What kind of smell test does this one pass?" asked Scot Ross, Executive Director of One Wisconsin Now. "Brett Davis's campaign takes contributions from top executives of an out-of-state, for-profit company and then sponsors legislation that specifically would help this for-profit company with taxpayer funds."

The horror, the horror. The sum total of these donations? $500. Probably less than one hour of legal bills paid by the taxpayers to investigate the activities of Scot Ross when he worked for the legislature. Meanwhile, do you remember State Senator John Lehman (D-Racine) who tried to kill Wisconsin virtual schools while pretending to save them? Lehman got $142,525 from the state teachers union, enough to fund all sorts of scandalous behaviour by Scot Ross if he wanted to.

One Wisconsin Now does not believe that "every kid deserves a great school". The state teachers union claims that it wants every child to go to a great school, but they're doing everything they can to close one down. We'll see how many members of the legislature are willing to close a school down merely because it is successful.