Wisconsin

Wisconsin Governor Defies Court, Prepares for Coronation

Wisconsin continues to spin out of control and a constitutional crisis looms as a judge this week again ordered Walker's administration to halt implementation of his bill stripping Wisconsin public workers of collective bargaining rights. Walker's team moved to publish the law in defiance of the court order last Friday night and began implementation of the bill on Saturday. These actions prompted an irate judge this week to clarify her previous standing order, making it "crystal clear" that "further implementation of the Act is enjoined."

Is Your Underwear Undermining Your Values? What Is Jockey's CEO Doing at a Tea Partiers' Convention and with David Koch?

MADISON--Is your underwear undermining your values? The new scrutiny of CEOs that has been ignited by the historic Wisconsin labor protests has turned up concerns close to home, very close to home--for the vast majority of people who wear underwear. To take a page from the ubiquitous Capitol One ad campaign, what's in your blue jeans? Is your underwear choice unwittingly paying the salary of a CEO who shares your values or who actively works against them?

Did the Union-Busting Bill Just Become Law?

News outlets are reporting that the Legislative Reference Bureau (LRB) has published Governor Walker's union-busting bill, despite a court order preventing publication on grounds that the bill's passage likely violated Open Meetings laws. A quick review of the statutes suggests the bill may have become law, but also suggests the entire court battle may have been focused on the wrong characters, and that the state has arguably violated the court order.

Indiana Prosecutor's Email to Walker Encouraged Wisconsin Violence

Johnson County, Indiana deputy prosecutor and Republican activist Carlos Lam resigned from his job after the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism discovered an email he sent to Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker suggesting the governor have an "associate" make a fake, violent attack to discredit union protesters and influence media coverage of the protests. Lam resigned shortly before the Center published a story containing excerpts of the email sent from Lam's account on February 19 praising Walker for standing up to unions and suggesting a "false flag" attack on Walker. Lam wrote,

...I think that the situation in Wisconsin presents a good opportunity for what's called a 'false flag' operation. If you could employ an associate who pretends to be sympathetic to the unions' cause to physically attack you (or even use a firearm against you), you could discredit the public unions. ... Employing a false flag operation would assist in undercutting any support the media may be creating in favor of the unions. God bless, Carlos F. Lam.

Lam denies writing the email, saying his email account was hacked. It would have been easy to verify whether his email account had been hacked by examining information that could be obtained from Hotmail and his Internet service provider, but Lam declined to reveal the provider's name to the Center so they could check out the hacking claim. This news follows an earlier admission by Governor Walker to a prank caller pretending to be David Koch of Koch Industries that he and his team had considered placing troublemakers in the crowd, but Walker claims to have rejected the idea for political considerations.

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"Have You No Decency?"

Professor William CrononWilliam Cronon is a professor of history, geography and environmental studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the prize winning author of many books such as Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England, which revolutionized the study of environmental history. He is known as a guy with such a deep and abiding love of Wisconsin and its traditions that he leads the "get to know us" bus tour of the state offered to new faculty each year. Glaciers, rocks and history are on his agenda; politics and cheese he leaves to fellow-Wisconsinite and Capital Times editor John Nichols.

But this mild-mannered professor kicked a hornet's nest this week with an op-ed in the New York Times on Governor Scott Walker, and the push back was immediate. The Wisconsin GOP is now demanding his emails.

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