Imagine the police ignoring evidence of a crime because the right person didn’t call 911. Welcome to the the latest episode of Wisconsin Recall Election Follies.

Wisconsin's Elections 'Watchdogs'

The latest:

[Madison, Wisc...] Citizens not affiliated with either the recall organizations or the office holders targeted for recall this spring have found scores of problems with the petitions, but Wisconsin’s elections watchdogs have decided they will not consider any of their evidence.

GAB Director and General Counsel Kevin Kennedy said there is no process in place for accepting information from outside groups and individuals. Governor Scott Walker and the four Republican state senators against whom recall petitions were filed last month are the only parties that can contest the validity of signatures, according to Kennedy.

The GAB will not investigate or consider independently-submitted evidence of recall petition fraud. This includes circumstances wherein individuals might notify the board that their own name and forged signature were submitted.

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Here’s an idea from the misnamed Wisconsin Government Accountability Board: Let’s make the attempt to recall Governor Scott Walker even nuttier.

On Monday morning the Wisconsin ‘Elections Watchdogs’ alerted media that the Walker recall petitions would be available sometime later that day. By dinnner time, they basically said, never mind.

You can’t make this stuff up.

From our coverage:

Stunner: Walker Recall Petitions NOT Available for Online Review

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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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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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Think the Wisconsin Teachers’ union is worried that Wisconsin’s new labor law will lead to a dramatic decline in union membership? They’re going all in on the August recall campaigns, spending nearly a half million dollars in just one day. For radio ads only. In Wisconsin. Clearly, for now, they have a lot of money to burn. They’re not going to go down without a fight.

[Madison, Wisc...] WEAC, Wisconsin’s largest teachers’union, spent nearly a half million dollars in one day on behalf of Democratic candidates through their political aciton committee, the MacIver News Service has learned.

According to records on file at the Wisconsin Governement Accountability Board, on July 22 WEAC PAC spent  $424,000 on a radio ad buy to support two Democrat State Senators being recalled, and five Democrat candidates who are challenging Republican incumbent Senators.

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The latest from the Big Labor efforts to strip Republicans of control of the Wisconsin state senate. State labor unions have always been major players in elections here, however, this kind of outside influence on Wisconsin legislative elections is unprecedented. Six million dollars from one interest group for only nine legislative elections? Note thate most of the recalls are not for a month yet, so this totall is sure to increase, perhaps 2-3 times….

[Madison, Wisc…] MNS …In the first eight days of July nearly three million dollars has been sent to Wisconsin by national liberal organizations and individuals, with more than two million dollars coming from large national labor unions.

Big Labor has now sent more than six million dollars to finance recall efforts in Wisconsin according to a review of campaign finance reports conducted by the MacIver News Service. The figures only account for disbursements reported to the Wisconsin Government Accountability Board; these organizations do not have to report expenditures made for efforts to communicate with their own membership.

The contributions can come in the form of monetary contributions like wire transfers and checks or in-kind contributions. Wisconsin statutes define “in-kind” contributions as a disbursement by a contributor to procure a thing of value or service for the benefit of a registrant who authorized the disbursement.

All told, Big Labor has spent more than $6,419,000 in the recall efforts this year, having delivered $2.2 million to the state since July 1.

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All six Democrats challenging Republican incumbents in Senate recall elections are major beneficiaries of ActBlue, national liberal fundraising organization. ActBlue, founded in 2004, bills itself as a committee that allows liberal Democratic candidates to leverage a national grassroots donor base that wants to get involved in key elections. Candidates who would otherwise be confined to raising money from traditional sources are – with the help of ActBlue – able to reap huge sums of money from a national pool of thousands of liberal donors.

In this case, that sum is $568,045. ActBlue has removed some of the local accountability inherent in state level fundraising by building a platform that funnels out-of-state money into state elections. The Boston Globe reported in 2007 that ActBlue’s founders are seeking to “‘nationalize’ local races,” with their group. To date, they have raised over $170 million for liberal Democratic candidates.

Recent campaign finance reports by the six Democratic challenger candidates illustrate just how successful the left has been at using ActBlue to pour hundreds of thousands of out-of-state dollars into Wisconsin. As an important left-wing fundraising mechanism, ActBlue supports its operations with a 1% fee from all contributions, as well as requests for support from donors and Democratic campaigns. So, in addition to raising a massive amount of out-of-state money for Wisconsin’s Democratic senate recall candidates, ActBlue has benefited by receiving thousands of dollars in payments from these campaigns. The following is an accounting of all the money, most of it out-of-state, that ActBlue has funneled into the Democratic campaigns, and the amount of money each indebted campaign has paid ActBlue.

The bottom line is that ActBlue has as of July 11, 2011 funneled $568,045 into the campaigns of six Democratic state Senate campaigns as part of their strategy to influence state elections with out-of-state money. For voters, this means that each of these candidates is now beholden to a powerful national constituency that does not always understand the issues facing Wisconsin, nor care about which solution may be the most effective solution for the citizens of this state. (more…)

Democrats’ efforts to win control of the Wisconsin state senate through a series of recalls here is drawing millions of dollars and dozens of key campaign operatives from out of state, an ongoing MacIver News Service investigation has learned.

The group named “We are Wisconsin” has a decidedly non-Wisconsin infrastructure, with more than $1 million in PAC donations transferred to it earlier this week from national union sources and many of its key operatives coming from out of state.

Patrick Devney and Viet Shelton are two of We Are Wisconsin’s communications directors working on the recall elections.  Neither man appears to be from Wisconsin.

Devney is working to recall Senator Olson.  According to the Baraboo News Republic, Devney is from Appleton.  However, he cannot be found to have a Wisconsin address in online phone directories, which tend to go back at least 10 years.  Devney has worked on campaigns in Nebraska, Washington, Virginia and Louisiana as recently as February of this year.

Shelton is working to recall Senator Hopper.  He comes to Wisconsin from the State of Washington where he was labeled a rising star in Democratic politics.  Shelton was the campaign director for Transportation for Washington, Washington Governor Chris Gregoire’s deputy communications director, and worked for the Democratic National Committee.  He describes himself as a “campaign addict”  and “for the summer, in Wisconsin” on his twitter profile.

Democrat efforts, in general, have turned to out-of-state help.  Click here to see an online form specifically looking for “Wisconsin Out-of-State Volunteers.”

Hopper and Olsen will face their Democratic challengers in a general election recall contest on August 9th.

Second in a series of reports by the MacIver News Service.

And there is more on the way…

[Madison, Wisc…] A national labor union dumped $778 thousand into the We Are Wisconsin PAC just one week before recall elections take place, according to campaign finance documents reviewed by the MacIver News Service.

The AFL-CIO Committee on Political Education Treasury Account sent the money on Tuesday, July 5^th, according to Government Accountability Records.

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BREAKING>>>

New questions have arisen regarding those 14 Wisconsin Democratic state senators who fled to Illinois for three weeks this February in an ultimately unsuccessful effort to stop the Badger State’s new public employee labor law.

Somebody is lying.

The Senators have repeatedly insisted that they, themselves, paid their own bills.

Yet at a recent national gathering of liberal activists, one prominent national group bragged about raising $200,000 to help keep these Wisconsin Senators out of state.

Whoa. $200,000?

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The Recall Dave Hansen Committee went to court Monday seeking an injunction against the state Democratic Party. People who had signed the petition said they were receiving harassing phone calls from the party. The judge sided with the Democratic Party because the committee did not properly serve the request.