MADISON, Wis. (AP) – Supporters of an unprecedented effort to oust Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker from office said they will turn in more than enough signatures Tuesday to force the Republican into a recall election barely a year into his first term.

Walker, however, has no plans to be anywhere near the Capitol when recall organizers turn in the signatures by Tuesday’s deadline. The governor is scheduled to be in New York when organizers say they will be unloading the stacks of petitions, weighing a ton, from a truck and hauling them into the state election board’s offices.

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DETROIT (AP) – A person briefed on the matter says General Motors will ask Volt owners to bring their electric cars into dealers to strengthen the structure around the batteries.

The move is similar to a recall and involves the 8,000 Volts sold in the U.S. in the past two years.

The move comes after three batteries caught fire after side-impact crash tests done by federal safety regulators. The fires occurred seven days to three weeks after the tests and have been blamed on a coolant leak that caused an electrical short. No fires have broken out in real-world crashes.

The person says GM will contact Volt owners and have them return the cars to dealers for several structural repairs.

The repairs are a step below a formal recall.

From The Hill:

An electric vehicle manufacturer that received a $529 million loan from the Energy Department is recalling 239 vehicles.

The Transportation Department’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) said Thursday that the company, Fisker Automotive, will recall its Karma vehicles made between July 1, 2011, and Nov. 3, 2011, because of a faulty electric battery component that could cause a fire.

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So, it turns out Wisconsin’s election watchdogs are choosing to do the bare minimum when it comes to making it easier to detect duplicate and fraudulent signatures on the recall petitions.

Color me shocked.

GAB’s Refusal to Create Recall Database a Choice, Not Based on State Law

MADISON, WI — The Wisconsin Government Accountability Board could be doing more to make it easier to ensure the recall process is not tainted by fraud the MacIver News Service has learned.

“The statutes do not impose explicit barriers to the creation of a GAB database that contains the names and addresses of individuals who sign recall petitions or to public availability of the database,” said Katie Bender-Olson, Staff Attorney with the Wisconsin Legislative Council in a memo to Assembly Speaker Jeff Fitzgerald.

“To the contrary, the statute enumerating the powers and duties of GAB may support the agency’s authority to create a recall signature database and make it accessible to the public.”

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As seen at a busy Wisconsin intersection on December 17, 2011.

Leave your suggested caption in the comments section.

From the Associated Press:

General Motors will buy Chevrolet Volts back from any owner who is afraid the electric cars will catch fire, the company’s CEO said Thursday.

In an exclusive interview with The Associated Press, CEO Dan Akerson insisted that the cars are safe, but said the company will purchase the Volts because it wants to keep customers happy. Three fires have broken out in Volts after side-impact crash tests done by the federal government.

Akerson said that if necessary, GM will recall the more than 6,000 Volts now on the road in the U.S. and repair them once the company and federal safety regulators figure out what caused the fires.

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Should we call it the “new” new tone?

A death threat against Governor Walker was removed from Facebook on Monday, almost three full days after it was initially posted. “Rather than recall him… Can we kill him instead? Just curious,” wrote Regan Cowan on the Recall Walker Kick Off Rally event page on Facebook Friday afternoon. When someone responded with “He’s signed a bill allowing conceal to carry IN the capitol [sic]… Someone just might get away with it!!!” Cowan then posted: “I’m game.”

The effort to recall Governor Scott Walker is underway and is highly-organized, with dozens of employees set to work out of more than 20 planned regional offices. The Democratic Party of Wisconsin laid out its initial plan to recall Governor Scott Walker at a volunteer training meeting in Madison last month. DPW is working with a coalition of labor groups under the United Wisconsin umbrella and has divided the state into eight regions and is prepared to have 44 field officers operating out of 22 offices. (more…)

Just because they spent millions in their failed attempt to gain control of the Wisconsin State Senate this fall doesn’t mean the Big Labor-Dem Party coalition is out of gas. Or funds. Or manpower.

The effort to recall Governor Scott Walker is underway and is highly-organized, with dozens of employees set to work out of more than 20 planned regional offices.

The Democratic Party of Wisconsin laid out its initial plan to recall Governor Scott Walker at a volunteer training meeting in Madison Tuesday night.

The Wisconsin Reporter website sent a journalist to the local AFSCME offices where the meeting was held. The reporter collected some printed materials before being asked to leave. Those materials reveal a two-phased operation that only takes the recall effort to January 13.  Phase one is underway now, and involves building capacity and organizational structure. Phase two is the actual petition process, which goes from November 15 to January 13.

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For Wisconsin, it seemed that the 2012 election had come a summer early. Until August 16th the airwaves were full of ads by campaigns and outside groups urging voters to turnout and support a candidate of choice in one of the nine recall elections around the state. What would have otherwise been a tranquil summer was brushed aside when a torrent of money, activists and professionals swept the state in a prolonged battle that started in the late winter and early spring over the issue of collective bargaining reform.

The political landscape of Wisconsin didn’t change much as a result of the costly and noisy recall elections. But that doesn’t mean some important lessons weren’t learned. Elections this historic always yield important information and raise intriguing possibilities about how future political battles will play out. In a state historically split nearly 50-50 along ideological, if not partisan, lines with independents often progressively minded, the summer campaign offers some lessons that conservatives can take heart from.

Even though Democrats are touting their ability to knock off two incumbent state senators as a major success in the face of failed GOP attempts to go after three Democratic senators, Democratic gains are shallow. Every incumbent senator who faced a recall challenge (regardless of party) survived except when a massive personal scandal or political earthquake hit. Sen. Randy Hopper’s ill-timed affair with a staffer exploded early in the recall cycle and irreparably damaged him politically. Sen. Dan Kapanke’s district had for years been trending Democrat, and his personal connection to voters was not enough to outweigh the long-developing party shift that finally flipped the seat’s party affiliation.

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In yet another union-styled outrage, Democrats backed by union thugs in Wisconsin are using the personal information of voters found on recall petitions to harass them because they signed a petition to recall Green Bay Democrat State Senator Dave Hansen.

Over the last few weeks thousands of Wisconsin voters signed a recall petition in Green Bay to recall Hansen and when voters sign such petitions they must give their address and phone numbers so that authorities can verify the voter’s signature in order to approve the petition. Now it seems that the Wisconsin Democrat Party has gotten hold of these petitions and have begun a telephone harassment campaign against the individual voters that signed the petitions.

The Wisconsin GOP has discovered this disgusting campaign and have found that the Democrats are using a fake phone number and a fake caller ID in order to get voters to answer the phone only to be harangued about having signed the recall petition.

The Democratic Party has targeted for harassment people who signed recall petitions against Senator Hansen, making calls on beginning on Monday April 25th using a fake phone number and caller ID that showed up on phones as “Bay Care Aurora,” a well-known Green Bay area medical center. Once recall supporters answered the phone, they were told they were speaking with a Democrat Party of Wisconsin operative, and were questioned about signing a petition to recall Hansen.

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Despite claims to the contrary from state Democratic officials, the recall efforts against eight Republican Senators could be coordinated by workers from Washington, DC, the MacIver News Service has learned.

“These aren’t being run by national operatives,” said Democratic Party of Wisconsin Chairman Mike Tate on the statewide UpFront with Mike Gousha television program. “This is not some prefabbed, manufactured effort.”

However the MacIver News Service has obtained a recruitment advertisement which solicited applicants from the Washington, DC area for the positions of “Field Organizers” for the Wisconsin Recalls.

The ad, for the Madison-based “Wisconsin Progress ” organization, was listed on the website of The Brad Traverse Group.

The Traverse site, operated out of Falls Church, Va, bills itself as “the leading resource for anyone seeking a job on Capitol Hill and off the Hill in the fields of government affairs, public affairs and communications.”

Although Tate asserted the recalls were organic and outside interests from Madison and Washington, DC were merely assisting with the efforts, the Wisconsin Progress advertisement says the duties for the positions include, but are not limited to: “Execute a field operation in a targeted state senate district–Manage a volunteer effort to collect recall signatures–Operate and Manage phonebank–Implement mass canvassing operations–Outreach to other progressive organizations to recruit volunteers–Data Management.”

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The recall of New Jersey Senator Robert Menendez took a step forward yesterday with a promising oral argument in New Jersey state court.  The New Jersey Constitution expressly provides for the recall of members of Congress representing the state in a provision adopted by a 75% favorable vote of the people in 1995.  The New Jersey state legislature then expressly provided by statute for the procedures for such a recall.

The Committee to Recall Robert Menendez filed papers for the circulation of their petitions to begin last September.  But the Secretary of State, who has no authority to issue rulings on constitutional questions, nevertheless refused to approve them on the grounds that her own New Jersey state constitution must be unconstitutional under the federal constitution, which she said did not allow such recalls.

The three judge appellate panel considering yesterday whether the recall should proceed expressed reluctance to declare a provision of their own state’s constitution duly adopted by the people null and void.  They also seemed receptive to the argument by the recall committee that they were only asking the court for an order for the circulation of petitions to proceed, and there is nothing in the U.S. Constitution that prohibits that.  To the contrary, the U.S. Constitution protects the political expression involved in signing a petition calling for the recall of an elected official, and the petitioning of government for the redress of grievances.

If the recall committee gets the required signatures from over a million citizens calling for the recall of Senator Menendez, and the majority of citizens vote to recall him in a recall election, and the Senator decides to thumb his nose at the will of the people anyway, then the issue of whether state recalls of members of Congress are constitutional under the U.S. Constitution would be presented to the courts.  But until then all that the New Jersey recall committee is asking for is the freedom of political expression involved in gathering recall petition signatures, and the U.S. Constitution protects rather than prohibits that.

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Eighteen states provide for recall elections to remove state officials.  Nine of those provide for the same for their Congressional representatives.  But such a right of recall can and should be adopted in every state.

Ideally this would be done by amending the state constitution to provide for such recall elections.  But it can be done through statute as well, with the New Jersey Uniform Recall Election Law as a good model.

The greatest opportunity is in the states that already provide for citizen initiatives to put state constitutional amendments or proposed statutes on the state ballot for a vote of the people for adoption.  In these states, the citizens can act directly, without depending on the politicians to adopt a check on their own power.

The right of recall is desirable because it maintains democratic accountability to the people throughout the entire term of elected officials, rather than just at election time.  This is more relevant now because increasingly we see an attitude among elected officials that they know best and the people are ignorant yahoos who should be ignored until they need to be fooled again at election time.  The people need a right of recall to remove officials who display this anti-democratic attitude after they are elected.

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