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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Dane County District Attorney Ismael Ozanne sued the Wisconsin legislature over the passage of Gov. Scott Walker’s budget repair bill, citing government transparency issues. He argued that a legislative committee did not post proper notice of its meeting before voting on the legislation.

“Transparency in government is of the utmost importance. It’s the foundation that builds communities trust in representatives and government,” Ozanne was quoted as saying at the time.

But Ozanne does not operate his own office by those same standards.

Several weeks ago, Education Action Group submitted two Open Records requests – to Ozanne and former Dane County Executive Kathleen Falk – seeking copies of their email communications that pertained to their efforts to block the budget repair bill.
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Media Trackers conducted an open records request investigation of election day registrations in 15 Milwaukee and Dane County wards for the April 5 election. With just a small sampling of election-day registrations, Media Trackers uncovered significant potential abuses of the same-day registration system and numerous cases of incomplete voter registrations.

Potential Voter Registration Abuses

• In City of Madison Ward 48, one person corroborated (vouched) for three consecutive voters. When asked to write in the corroborator’s address, this person listed two different address, that in each case matches the residence of the individual trying to vote.
• In City of Madison Ward 46, two instances were recorded where an individual required corroboration for his proof of residence, and then was permitted to corroborate for someone else using the residence they could not prove.
• Maura Tracy, formerly employed by the Democratic Party of Wisconsin in a number of capacities, corroborated for seven individuals who were unable to provide proof of residence in City of Madison Ward 44.
• One individual used an “acceptance letter to the University of Minnesota” as his proof of residence. This would not fall under any of the acceptable proofs of residence as spelled out by the Wisconsin Government Accountability Board (GAB).
• 126 voters in just 15 wards required corroboration because they couldn’t provide of residency, despite the 12 different acceptable proofs of residence accepted by the Wisconsin GAB.

Incomplete Voter Registrations

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Even the most avid circus goers tire of the big top, apparently.

Saturday, various labor and left wing organizations attempted to hold another massive protest at the Wisconsin State Capitol.

The lackluster May Day rallies in Milwaukee and Madison were filled with pleas to head to Madison on May 14th to show Scott Walker that the fight isn’t over. Liberal radio hosts plugged the event. Lefty bloggers posted about it. Labor unions sent out emails and robo calls to their members. Madison coffehouses, bookstores and telephone poles were littered with brochures about the rally. People were bused in from across the state.

Yawn.

It appears “We’re not going away!” isn’t as catchy as “We skipped out of work, to show we deserve our pay.”

When the allure of shutting down schools or shutting down the legislature are missing, so are a hundred thousand protesters it seems. Now, 7-10,000 is still a crowd, but in Madison, Wisconsin the left can get that many out to protest an appearance by the rare conservative speaker on campus.

The changes to the public employee union’s collective bargaining power remain held up in court. But Act 10 has been signed into law. It’s done. It is just going to take some time to get past the liberal judges in Dane County.

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Never acknowledge conservative victories as legitimate.

Never concede defeat in legislative votes. There is always a cloud.

Litigate everything.

Rely on Dane County judges whenever possible.

Elections only matter if liberals win.

Shut down schools, bring legislative process to a halt, tie up the courts, extort  businesses, try to overturn elections … and then say “this is what democracy looks like.”

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The public has a right to know who or what is influencing its government.  Open Records and Freedom of Information laws are critical to ensuring a transparent and accountable government.  Taxpayers deserve to know how their hard-earned money is being spent.  And we ought to know who is massaging legislation or prodding elected officials’ actions.

That’s why Education Action Group, a Michigan-based national education reform organization, submitted an Open Records request to Dane County (Wisconsin) District Attorney Ismael Ozanne to obtain any and all communications he had surrounding litigation to block Gov. Scott Walker’s budget repair bill.

A district attorney traditionally focuses on crime at the local level.  EAG saw it as highly unusual that a DA would seek to block – and effectively void – an action by a state legislature.  Who or what pushed him to do this?

Is he the Mr. Washington of Wisconsin?  Or did Big Labor urge him and work with him to block the necessary reform?

It’s EAG’s intention to find out and we’re serious about it.  That’s why we hired Paul Bucher, a Wisconsin lawyer who himself was a district attorney for 27 years.  In addition to Ozanne, EAG is also seeking communications of Dane County Executive Kathleen M. Falk, who also filed suit to block the law from taking effect.

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As the Wisconsin Supreme Court race looks to be decided by just a matter of a few hundred votes, questions naturally arise about potential improprieties that may have been conducted in an effort to “get out the vote.” One such instance occurred in Madison where two taxi cab companies decided to offer free rides as part of a “Democracy in Motion” effort to “support our community by helping people get to the polls.”

The cab companies Union Cab Coop and Badger Cab offered free rides to the polls by request in the Dane County communities of:

• Middleton (Kloppenburg: 68%)
• Monona (Kloppenburg: 75%)
• Shorewood (Kloppenburg: 84%)
• City of Madison (Kloppenburg: 82%)
• Blooming Grove (Kloppenburg: 74%)
• Burke (Kloppenburg: 60%)
• Maple Bluff (Kloppenburg: 59%)
• Fitchberg (Kloppenburg: 68%)

Seems rather benign on the surface, but when one considers the areas in which these cabs served, they voted for the JoAnne Kloppenburg to the tune of 79%.

According to Union Cab Coop, they brought 102 people to the polls yesterday. When Media Trackers contacted Badger Cab they had not compiled the exact numbers but estimates were that they brought “around 50 people” to the polls.

Despite this “non-partisan” facade, Union Cab Coop has posted on their website a series of statements that reveal that there may have been more than meets the eye for these friendly free rides.

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The ruling on Friday by a liberal Dane County judge to block Governor Scott Walker’s collective bargaining bill was “an assault on the judiciary and the legislature.” The legal argument challenge was, in fact, so weak that it bordered on frivolous… and local MSM coverage has been absurdly uninformed. What happened is that an activist judge ignored the clear language of the state statutes, the state constitution, legislative rules, and Supreme Court precedencts to hand the unions a victory. It’s all breath-taking stuff.

Judge MaryAnn Sumi

Don’t take my word for it. This is an analysis written by Ellen Nowak, the former legal counsel and chief of staff to the Wisconsin Assembly Speaker:

Try again?

The fallacies in the ruling by Dane County Judge MaryAnn Sumi to issue a temporary restraining order against the publication of 2011 Wisconsin Act 10, referred to as the Budget Repair Bill, are perpetuated by the misrepresentations of facts and the law in the editorial in the Journal Sentinel on Saturday, March 19 (“To GOP: Try again”).

Both Judge Sumi and the Journal Sentinel ignored the law when rendering opinions on whether the Budget Repair Bill was properly noticed before a conference committee vote.

This wasteful exercise of legal maneuvering by the Democrats reminds me of a saying in politics: when you can’t win on the merits, argue procedure.

A disagreement with the underlying bill does not authorize one to ignore the law. Unfortunately, that was done here. The Democrats argue that the conference committee violated the open meetings law by not allowing enough time from the notice of the meeting until the vote. Judge Sumi and the Journal Sentinel bought that argument hook, line and sinker.

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Today, a liberal judge in a liberal Wisconsin county at the request of a liberal district attorney has issued a temporary restraining order that blocks publication — and therefore the enactment, of the law Governor Scott Walker and Republican legislators passed that limits Public Union collective bargaining rights to issues regarding wages only. This order, issued by Dane County (Madison) Court Judge Maryann Sumi is strictly based on a technical procedural issue. No one’s arguing the law passed wasn’t constitutional (yet– see #2 below), the question is whether or not Republicans violated Wisconsin’s open-meeting law during the session in which the vote took place.   They didn’t.

But whatever the legal outcome, the bill will still pass. In a worst case scenario the Republicans merely need to reconvene and pass the bill again, this time making triple-pinky-sure the Left can’t hassle them in court regarding the open-meeting law. Should this happen, the big question is whether or not State Senate Democrats will repeat their shameful escapades and hot-foot it to Illinois again. But even that won’t stop the law from passing because a quorum isn’t necessary for this part of the bill.

So if this is the case, then what’s going on? If there’s no way the Left can stop the law from eventually being passed, what are they up to?

Three things:

1. The Psychological Game: Yesterday, I published a piece detailing the intensifying threats, violence, vandalism and intimidation taking place in Wisconsin against Republican legislators and their supporters in the form of  Tea Party leaders and local businesses. Obviously, the idea here is to use the worst kind of thuggish mob tactics on legislators in the hopes they’ll be too afraid to vote for this bill a second time. If you remember the tension and stress we as a nation went through while the 2000 presidential election was being recounted and litigated, multiply that times 100 and mix it with the continuous threat of violence. That’s the atmosphere hanging over all of Wisconsin right now.  Ratcheting that tension even higher today is the fact that there will be no final ruling from this judge for at least another two weeks, which means the  tunnel of emotional hell these legislators thought they might finally be emerging from has just slammed shut.

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From the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:

Dane County Circuit Judge Maryann Sumi issued a temporary restraining order Friday, barring the publication of a controversial new law that would sharply curtail collective bargaining for public employees.

Sumi’s order will prevent Secretary of State Doug La Follette from publishing the law until she can rule on the merits of the case. Dane County Ismael Ozanne is seeking to block the law because he says a legislative committee violated the state’s open meetings law.

Sumi said Ozanne was likely to succeed on the merits.

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