A photograph has emerged of Democrat gubernatorial candidate Kathleen Falk proudly holding a copy of the pledge that she signed in exchange for union support of her campaign against Governor Walker. Repeated requests for comment on the picture were denied by the Falk campaign.

Falk (left) with the union pledge.

Falk is a former county executive in Dane County and two-time failed statewide candidate. The date of the recall election has yet to be set, and Falk is already facing competition from one primary challenger, and rumors are swirling that more Democrats could jump into the race. Despite the uncertain state of the race, one matter is crystal clear: Falk is the only candidate to meet secretly with unions and sign a pledge to veto the next state budget if it does not repeal collective bargaining reforms. In exchange for her pledge, Falk landed the endorsement of WEAC, the state teachers union. Just today she managed to secure the endorsement of AFSCME, another union pressuring for the pledge.

Almost as soon as word of the pledge leaked out a firestorm of controversy erupted. Mary Bell, president of the teachers union, denied that she and other union leaders extracted the pledge in exchange for their political support. Bell told the press and public that extracting a veto pledge in exchange for a political endorsement was not something her union would do.

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For the second time in a session that is only weeks old, Indiana House Democrats refused to show up for work on Tuesday, effectively delaying the passage of right-to-work legislation. The first delay was a three-day boycott that finished with Democrats coming back to the table to continue other legislative business. House Republicans expected to have a vote on the contentious right to-work bill after Democrat leader B. Patrick Bauer (known for vainly sporting a toupee) made public and private promises that his caucus would show up and participate in the legislative process.

But while Bauer and his fellow Democrats have been throwing temper tantrums and obstructing legislative business, other opponents of right-to-work legislation have been busy producing and distributing studies that purport to show how the reform would hurt Indiana’s economy. The several studies and reports reach a variety of conclusions. Some say that right-to-work would undermine private sector pension plans and others say that the reform will not have any meaningful impact on drawing job creators – especially those in the manufacturing sector – to the state. South Carolina’s success in attracting a new Boeing plant seems to go unmentioned.

Leading the way among those providing intellectual firepower and talking points for pro-union right to-work opponents is the Economic Policy Institute. EPI, a D.C. based think-tank that specializes in state-based research, has released a steady stream of information and research allegedly debunking the benefits of the reform and calling on Indiana policymakers to bend to union demands by killing the legislation.

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Democrats and their leftwing allies are touting the fact that they reached their 1 million-signature goal in the effort to recall Governor Scott Walker. Political observers on both sides of the spectrum had predicted that a recall would proceed because organizers would eventually get enough signatures to force Walker to defend his post less than two years after taking office.

While recall advocates only needed to gather 540,208 valid signatures to force an election, reaching the 1 million mark was a symbolic goal that they set to prove the strength of the movement. However, before judging their efforts a complete success, several factors must be noted.

First, the petition process was riddled with fraud and tainted with questionable ethics at several points. Early in the process the Soros-funded One Wisconsin Now encouraged those opposed to Walker to sign recall petitions multiple times. Although not necessarily an illegal act (unless there is the specific intent to commit fraud), signing a petition multiple times does raise questions about how best to properly calculate the true number of signature since, in theory and according to state law, only the first signature will count. Even the Government Accountability Board’s announcement that it will use software to help catch duplicates, though a step in the right direction, doesn’t promise to catch every or even most of those kinds of errors.

When a Milwaukee man proudly said he signed recall petitions 80 times as a way of getting back at Republicans who, he believes, stole the 2000 election in Florida, he proved just how error prone the process can be.

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You have to draw the line somewhere, or maybe not. The Left in Wisconsin is so incensed at what Governor Scott Walker has done that they are apparently willing to associate with anyone who despises Walker as much as they do. Walker is being targeted for a recall election because of his work to curtail the power of public sector unions – a move required to help balance the state’s $3.6 billion structural deficit left by outgoing Democrat Governor Jim Doyle, and a move that helped return power to local government jurisdictions facing the prospect of hiking taxes to meet their budgets.

Democrats and leftwing groups in the state must secure a minimum of 540,208 signatures to force a recall election in which Governor Walker would have to defend his seat against a Democrat challenger. Last week was the final week in which signatures could be gathered on recall petitions.

To help keep the momentum going in the final week, and presumably to help fire up the troops, Ian Murphy, a Buffalo, New York based blogger came to Wisconsin to tour the state and cheer on the effort. Murphy earned folk hero status among the state’s anti-Walker class when he impersonated as billionaire libertarian donor David Koch and managed to bluff his way into a one-on-one phone call with Walker during the collective bargaining reform debate. The audio of the call was released on Murphy’s blog, the Buffalo Beast. It contained nothing shocking about Walker whereas Murphy merely fulfilled all of the Left’s stereotypes of what rich conservatives and libertarians must be like in private life.

But faking like he is a conservative isn’t the only thing Murphy does. In a column on his website headlined “F*** the Troops,” he writes:

“So, 4000 rubes are dead. Cry me the Tigris. Another 30,000 have been seriously wounded. Boo f—ing hoo. They got what they asked for—and cool robotic limbs, too.”

For such profanity laced, bigoted and insensitive comments it would make sense for Democrat elected officials and party staff to shun Murphy on his visit to the state. Unfortunately, they welcomed him with open arms because he, like them, is opposed to Governor Walker.

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On Sunday, the Green Bay Press-Gazette posted a link on its Facebook page to an Associated Press story detailing state aid cuts to organizations that help victims of sexual abuse. After that story was posted, a reader left a comment expressing outrage that the state would cut such aid, and asserted that perhaps Governor Scott Walker’s wife or children should become victims of sexual assault so the governor could see the how devastating the state aid cuts really are.

The first comment reads:

Another thing Walker has destroyed . . . well just more people that will sign for recall walker now . . . is he really that ignorant to even attack victims at their lowest . . . what a real prize, maybe someone should rape and victimize his wife and daughter if he has any . . . or even sons, then he will wish he supported this service a lot more.

The women, Nancy Butzlaff, appears to have been the first to comment on this particular story on the Press-Gazette’s Facebook page. Not too long after her comment, another woman, Jenni Kone-Keeler, suggested that perhaps the governor himself should become the victim of a sexual assault or some assault-related crime. One conservative activist, Lauren Stephens, said that the comments were left up on the Press-Gazette’s Facebook page for close to nine hours before the paper removed them.

According to Butzlaff’s personal Facebook page, she is married to Robert A. Butzlaff. A search of a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel database found a Robert A. Butzlaff who works for the state of Wisconsin as a corrections officer and made over $63,000–including overtime pay–in 2010.

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Media Trackers discovered that over 20 individuals voted, some illegally, from one of Senator Lena Taylor’s (D-Milwaukee) properties during the April 5, 2011 spring election. According to a Media Trackers open records request with the City of Milwaukee Election Commission, the property at 1018 N 35th St. in Milwaukee currently has 36 active voter registrations and at least 23 individuals voted using the address.

Media Trackers was tipped off to Senator Taylor’s property by the Wisconsin GrandSons of Liberty, who found 11 individuals that registered on election day to vote from Taylor’s property, 7 of which were corroborated by Senator Taylor’s mother, Lena J Taylor.

“Using open records requests, we obtained copies of the 11,017 Milwaukee County Election Day Registrations and created a database to analyze the entries from all 19 municipalities in the county,” said Tim Dake of the Wisconsin GrandSons of Liberty. Dake explained further that “our volunteers ran numerous queries on the data and were surprised to see the name Lena Taylor appear on so many forms.”

The Property

According to property records obtained from the Milwaukee Department of Neighborhood Services, Senator Lena C. Taylor owns the property at 1018 N. 35th St. in Milwaukee. The property has 6 units and is zoned by the Milwaukee Zoning Code as RT3. According to the City of Milwaukee Zoning Code, properties zoned RT3 are intended to “promote, preserve and protect neighborhoods intended primarily for two-family dwellings.”

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On the evening of November 17th a number of Occupy protesters in Milwaukee gathered on a bridge over I-43 as part of a nationwide effort to draw attention to the Occupy movement’s agenda. The protesters succeeded in shutting down the bridge for several hours during rush hour causing traffic snarls and generating media attention. In a memorable moment, Milwaukee Police Chief Ed Flynn refused to mass arrest the protesters saying, “they can sit and freeze their butts off.” A mass arrest was what protesters wanted.

In the midst of the larger story, another side drama seems to have been unfolding. The bridge protest was held a mere three days into the official period to circulate petitions to force a recall of Governor Scott Walker. Lately, Walker recall supporters have moved to make the Occupy movement an extension of the recall Walker effort and on the bridge recall petitions were circulated among protesters.

An anonymous individual attending the protest captured on camera some potentially disturbing tactics used by the Occupy/Recall Walker petition circulators. The video (posted below) and pictures show a young female signing a recall petition and taking a cigarette offered to her by a person standing near the petition. The individual who recorded the video and took the pictures could not be reached for comment on Saturday evening.

In order for the incident to be a bribe, the cigarette would have had to be offered in consideration for the signature on the recall petition. Wisconsin law does not prohibit anyone from offering something of consideration in exchange for a signature on a recall petition. However, it is illegal to bribe someone in regards to voting. In 2000 the infamous “smokes for votes” scandal caught a Democratic operative handing out cigarettes to Milwaukee’s homeless in exchange for their vote in the presidential election, and earlier this year Wisconsin Jobs Now! came under scrutiny for their tactic of offering minority voters a barbecue chicken dinner if they voted early in a local state Senate recall election.

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It’s either a hack into their website, or a deeply revealing Freudian slip. Appearing briefly on the Democratic Party of Wisconsin’s website this morning was an event billed as an opportunity to gather signatures to recall Republican Gov. Scott Walker from a cemetery. According to the listing, “We will be taking names from headstones and making recall petitions with the names we find.”

Anti-Walker activists and groups have 62 days in which to gather the over 540,000 signatures required to force a recall election of Governor Walker. In order to keep their pledge to recall both the governor and lieutenant governor, the groups will need to gather close to 1.1 million signatures in that 62-day period, which started on Tuesday.

The cemetery from which the names were to be taken and placed on recall petitions does exist in downtown West Bend, right next to the West Bend School District’s administrative office building.

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In a desperate move to boost their effort to recall Governor Scott Walker, the liberal Soros front group One Wisconsin Now has hijacked the Occupy Wall Street movement. The formal Democratic Party-sponsored effort to force a recall of Governor Walker starts this week, with activists needing to gather over 1,000,000 signatures in the next 60 days to recall Walker and his lieutenant governor, Rebecca Kleefisch. Today a social media effort billed as “Occupy Walker” (see here for the Twitter account) kicks off an opening week effort to disseminate as many anti-Walker “facts” as One Wisconsin Now can invent.

One Wisconsin Now, a member of the national Progress Now network, has been active in Wisconsin since 2006. The group’s executive director is Scot Ross, a boisterous, chain-smoking political hack and failed candidate for Secretary of State. Ross is best known for his involvement in the Wisconsin Caucus Scandal when he admitted to prosecutors that he worked nearly full time at taxpayer expense on a Democratic lawmaker’s campaign.

The Occupy Wall Street movement has, for now, superseded the energy and intensity of the Madison protests that took place this past spring. Then, the national spotlight covered the hundreds of thousands of union members and professional activists who mobbed the Wisconsin capitol in an attempt to intimidate legislators and Governor Walker into halting reform efforts. Now, a handful of worn-out protesters with a laundry list of run-ins with the law forlornly watch as a national movement mimicking their tactics has moved from Wall Street to streets across America.

It is perhaps no surprise that the hardcore political knife fighters who will stop at nothing short of a recall of Scott Walker have chosen to co-opt the Occupy Wall Street movement. The move will certainly generate some attention and make the recall movement more relevant with current protest events, something that could not happen otherwise since months of time have elapsed since the Madison protests. But beyond generating excitement among the liberal base, the tactic will do nothing.

Occupy Walker is just an attempt by far-left political professionals to use the Occupy Wall Street movement as a political pawn. If they fall for it, Occupy Wall Street will become just another tool in a status quo that it thinks it can change. (more…)

On Monday, the MacIver News Service reported that a death threat had been made against Governor Scott Walker on a recall Walker Facebook page. The page was advertising the upcoming Walker recall kickoff rally hosted by We Are Wisconsin, one of the leading leftwing conduit groups that channeled millions of dollars in out-of-state money into the summer recall elections. Regan Cowan, a Dane County resident, was the one who made the threat. Shortly after the threat was brought to light, the comment was deleted from Facebook.

Regan Cowan (Left)

Cowan, who suggested that Walker be killed instead of recalled, said that she was willing to make use of the state’s new concealed carry law to carry out her idea. Her personal Facebook page was unavailable Tuesday morning and an initial search of Facebook did not reveal any other comments made by Cowan. Media Trackers did, however, review Ms. Cowan’s court records and found that she has a long history of civil and criminal issues.

In her record, which spans 25 different incidents, Cowan has pled guilty to two felony charges. The first one came in 2003 when she failed to report to jail, a Class H felony. The second one came in 2007 when she was found guilty of committing forgery, also a Class H felony.

Along with her felony in 2003, Cowan was found guilty five different times in incidents ranging from twice being found in possession of drug paraphernalia to damaging property, and then disorderly conduct and operating a vehicle on a revoked license. Perhaps one of the more disturbing cases came in 2004 when Cowan was involved in a hit and run incident that took place while she was driving with her license revoked.

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Jeremy Ryan is a habitual loser, or, to borrow a term from state Senator Glen Grothman (R-Wis.), a slob. Ryan is known around Madison, Wisconsin as the “Segway Boy” after his distinct mode of transportation that has made him nearly ubiquitous in the professional protest circuit of the city. Chances are, if you visited the state capitol at all since the protests were at their height this past spring, you’ve seen Ryan riding a Segway around the downtown area, or getting hauled out of the Senate or Assembly galleries after violating gallery rules with his antics.

Why does Jeremy Ryan matter? Because he – as one of the more obnoxious and well-known liberal protestors in Wisconsin – is a stereotypical example of the people who are still protesting. The outraged Wisconsin union members who flooded the state capitol are no longer leading the protests in Madison. In their place a new class of professional progressive protesters has arisen. It is they who are pouring beer on Wisconsin lawmakers and adopting ever more radical means to communicate their message. It is they that Dane County law enforcement is refusing to prosecute despite repeated and flagrant violations of the law.

Ryan’s public record as a protester has been well documented. Many of his protests have landed him citations from the police because he broke various ordinances, rules and laws related to public disturbances and public conduct. According to a Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel article in June, Ryan had received 15 citations and been arrested nine times in conjunction with his protesting. The 15 citations had, as of June, racked up a total of $3,604.50 in fines – not a penny of which Ryan seems to be intent on paying.

As a professional, full-time protestor Ryan has no income from a job. What little money he does seem able to scrape up through donations apparently goes to pay for medication that he needs to manage several health issues as well as fund his political action committee, Defending Wisconsin PAC. The PAC does not pay Ryan for his work as executive director. GAB documents show that the committee has raised $8,305.90, and had $4,452.08 still in the bank as of its latest report. Perhaps if Ryan collected a one-time salary from his PAC he could be responsible and pay his outstanding fines.

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