Today in 1940, the first NFL championship game was broadcast nationally on Mutual radio. Before long, Mutual announcer Red Barber probably wondered why they’d bothered.
Today in 1963, Frank Sinatra Jr. was kidnapped from a Lake Tahoe hotel. He was released two days later after his father paid $240,000 ransom. The kidnappers were arrested and sentenced to prison.
The top selling 8-track today in 1971:
Wisconsin’s infamous John Doe investigation was more sinister and politically driven than originally reported.
A Wisconsin Attorney General report on the year-long investigation into leaks of sealed John Doe court documents to a liberal British publication in September 2016 finds a rogue agency of partisan bureaucrats bent on a mission “to bring down the (Gov. Scott) Walker campaign and the Governor himself.”
The AG report, released Wednesday, details an expanded John Doe probe into a “broad range of Wisconsin Republicans,” a “John Doe III,” according to Attorney General Brad Schimel, that widened the scope of the so-called John Doe II investigation into dozens of right-of-center groups and scores of conservatives. Republican lawmakers, conservative talk show hosts, a former employee from the MacIver Institute, average citizens, even churches, were secretly monitored by the dark John Doe.
State Department of Justice investigators found hundreds of thousands of John Doe documents in the possession of the GAB long after they were ordered to be turned over to the Wisconsin Supreme Court.
The Government Accountability Board, the state’s former “nonpartisan” speech cop, proved to be more partisan than originally suspected, the state Department of Justice report found. For reasons that “perhaps may never be fully explained,” GAB held onto thousands of private emails from Wisconsin conservatives in several folders on their servers marked “Opposition Research.” The report’s findings validate what conservatives have long contended was nothing more than a witch-hunt into limited government groups and the governor who was turning conservative ideas into public policy.
“Moreover, DOJ is deeply concerned by what appears to have been the weaponization of GAB by partisans in furtherance of political goals, which permitted the vast collection of highly personal information from dozens of Wisconsin Republicans without even taking modest steps to secure this information,” the report states.
And in an all-too familiar occurrence involving allegations of government abuse, a key hard drive believed to contain the court-sealed John Doe documents leaked to The Guardian in October 2016 has suspiciously disappeared – GAB officials with knowledge of the hard drive can’t seem to explain what happened to it.
Still, despite a damning report laying out myriad examples of criminal misconduct by government bureaucrats, Schimel, a Republican, says his Department of Justice cannot file criminal charges – chiefly because of disappearing evidence, less-than-cooperative John Doe agents and the “systemic and pervasive mishandling of John Doe evidence (that) likely resulted in circumstances allowing the Guardian leak in the first place.”
Such failures prevent prosecutors from proving criminal liability beyond a reasonable doubt, the attorney general wrote, although the report points to a small universe of GAB employees that had access to the leaked documents.
They also seemed to have a political ax to grind.
The Department of Justice, however, recommends the John Doe judge initiate contempt proceedings against former GAB officials and the John Doe probe’s special prosecutor for “grossly” mishandling secret evidence. Schimel also recommends that Shane Falk, who served as lead staff attorney in the John Doe probes, be referred for discipline to the Wisconsin Court System’s Office of Lawyer Regulation. Falk took a job with a private law firm in August 2014, just as allegations of investigative abuse began to surround the political investigation.
Back Doe
The John Doe has a long and winding history. It all began in 2010, when the Milwaukee County District Attorney’s office, led by Democrat John Chisholm, signed off on a secret investigation into the Milwaukee County Executive’s office, at the time directed by then-Republican candidate for governor, Scott Walker.
It was Walker who, the year before, brought questions about a discrepancy in a county veterans fund to the DA’s attention. His chief of staff at the time asked the agency to investigate. Eventually, the district attorney’s office opened a John Doe, as Walker, a fiscal conservative in a liberal county, was rolling into his run for governor.
That investigation brought six convictions, only two of which were related to the original scope of the veterans fund investigation. Prosecutors, with the help of a very accommodating John Doe judge, went after Walker’s staff and conservative allies in what was commonly known in the DA’s office as the “Walker Doe,” according to an inside source. They threatened two County Executive staffers with lengthy prison sentences if they didn’t talk, if they didn’t turn on their boss. They didn’t because they couldn’t. There was nothing to tell, according to the targeted staffers.
Chisholm used the hundreds of thousands of electronic communications – including reams of private email – to seek a second John Doe. This time, the district attorney, with the help of the very willing Government Accountability Board, set their sights on just about every right-of-center group in Wisconsin. The probe investigated the prosecutors’ theory that conservative organizations illegally coordinated with Walker’s campaign during the bitterly partisan recall elections of 2011 and 2012.
John Doe agents effectively conducted a spy operation, secretly grabbing up millions of digital records from Republicans who had no idea they were being targeted in the Democrat-led dragnet. The agents capped it off in October 2013 with coordinated, predawn, armed raids on the homes of several conservative Wisconsinites. Many were forced to sit by while law enforcement officials rooted through their possessions in the name of a campaign finance paper investigation.
Only one problem: There was no illegal coordination, no campaign finance wrongdoing, no collusion. Sound familiar? (See Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller’s investigation into the Trump campaign). The John Doe judge at the time in early 2014 quashed the subpoenas used in the investigation. He found that the prosecutors lacked probable cause that crimes alleged had been committed.
The ruling followed a string of court decisions that not only raised questions about the prosecutors’ theory, but the tactics involved in the political probe.
In July 2016, the Wisconsin Supreme Court declared the John Doe investigation unconstitutional and ordered it shut down. The majority opinion concluded that Special Prosecutor Francis Schmitz was “the instigator of a ‘perfect storm’ of wrongs” perpetrated against citizens who were legally exercising their First Amendment rights. At least they were until the John Doe investigators silenced them.
Wisconsin’s John Doe law is similar to a grand jury investigation, without the benefit of a jury of peers. The procedures are overseen by a single judge with extraordinary power to compel witnesses to testify – all in the pursuit of determining whether a crime has been committed. Unlike a grand jury investigation where the accused can publicly defend themselves, John Doe targets and witnesses must remain silent. Failing to do so could land them in jail or subject them to steep fines.
After the Supreme Court decision, the Republican-led Legislature reformed the John Doe law and its secrecy order that one federal appeals court judge described as “screamingly unconstitutional.” It also jettisoned the “nonpartisan” Government Accountability Board following growing evidence of investigative abuses.
‘Pretty Please’
Despite court orders in January 2014 barring the John Doe prosecutors and their bureaucratic pals from further reviewing any of the “evidence” they had illegally obtained, GAB staff pushed on.
Days after the court order, Shane Falk, GAB’s lead attorney on the John Doe, directed staffer Molly Naggappala to log into the investigation’s account with an offsite data storage site where the millions of documents were stored (at taxpayer expense). He told Naggappala to print off emails seized from search warrants.
“Can you print out everything that you pulled out of Relativity (the data storage operator) and previously sent us? Then give a copy to Nate (Judnic) and one to me. Pretty please?”
Naggappala complied, according to the Attorney General’s investigative report. It was a “direct violation” of the judge’s cease and desist order.
Schmitz, the special prosecutor, didn’t order Falk to “stand down,” and Falk and other GAB staff continued to access the documents in defiance of the court order.
The documents Falk sought were the “very emails … that were leaked to the Guardian newspaper,” the DOJ report states.
It was previously reported that John Doe investigators used Gmail accounts disconnected from the state electronic communications system when sharing investigation information and ideas. The Department of Justice probe into the leaks found Falk used an external hard drive for the storage of separate John Doe files. Falk told DOJ investigators that he turned the hard drive over to colleague Nathan Judnic when he left the GAB.
Falk and former GAB staff and current administrators at the GAB’s successor, the state Ethics Commission, could not provide the hard drive to investigators. After some conflicting answers, none of the attorneys and bureaucrats could offer an explanation for what happened to it.
Falk came to the GAB with a left-leaning pedigree. He previously had served as a Democrat appointee on a state campaign ethics board, the predecessor to the GAB. In 2008, he testified before the relatively new GAB, urging the agency to find ways of “getting around the constitution” to go after issue ads from organizations such as Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce.
“When it comes to the point of it affecting an election, the compelling interest rises to the level where the state can get around the constitutional right to free speech,” he testified.
During the John Doe probe, Falk encouraged Schmitz, the special prosecutor, to stay strong in their pursuit of Walker and his conservative allies.
“Remember, in brief, this was a bastardization of politics and our state is being run by corporations and billionaires,” Falk wrote in an email on conservative issue advocacy. “That isn’t democracy to say the least, but due to how they do this dark money, the populace never knows.”
The populace also didn’t know just how political the John Doe probe had gotten.
‘Falk Boxes’
The Department of Justice report refers to “Falk boxes,” in which three hard drives in particular contained nearly 500,000 unique emails from Yahoo and Gmail accounts, totaling millions of pages.
“The hard drives included transcripts of Google Chat logs between several individuals, most of which were purely personal (and sometimes very private) conversations,” the report states.
GAB placed a “large portion” of the emails into several folders titled, “Opposition Research” or “Senate Opposition Research.”
John Doe investigators dug deep in their expansive “John Doe III” probe, obtaining through warrants electronic communications of the governor, Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Rochester) U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Oshkosh), former RNC chair Reince Priebus, U.S. Rep. Sean Duffy, and state Sens. Van Wanggard and Howard Marklein. They also monitored the emails of conservative talk show hosts Vicki McKenna, Mark Belling, and Charlie Sykes, as well as former MacIver Institute employee Brian Fraley.
“The breadth of information and communications contained in the ‘Falk boxes,’ apparently as the result of the John Doe III investigation into Wisconsin Republicans, was breathtaking,” the attorney general’s report asserts. “Just to illustrate this point, the investigators obtained, categorized, and maintained over 150 personal emails between Senator Leah Vukmir and her daughter, including emails containing private medical information and other highly personal information.”
Why?
“DOJ was unable to determine why investigators ever obtained, let alone saved and labeled, over 150 very private and very personal emails between a Senator and her child, or why investigators placed those emails in a folder named ‘Opposition Research,’” the report states.
Vukmir, a Republican candidate for U.S. Senate, was astounded in learning that she was spied on, but she vowed to fight against such “intrusive behavior.”
“Attempting to bully her into silence will not work,” said Vukmir campaign spokeswoman Jessica Ward. “Sen. Vukmir intends on exploring additional legislative or legal options to ensure this never occurs again, and that any individuals involved are held fully accountable.”
But the Vukmir emails were just the tip of the iceberg. The Department of Justice investigation found the John Doe probe swept up all kinds of private emails, including:
- Over 1,000 emails between a private bible study group called a “Life Group” at Blackhawk Church in Middleton, Wisconsin. The emails covered such subjects as “LG- He is risen,” “LG- helping out Mom,” “LG- Game Night,” “LG- Spiritual Formation,” “LG-The Spirit and Scripture,” “LG-New Sermon Series=Rainbows and Sugarplums,” and “[Redacted] Requests Prayer.”
- Pictures of a woman who was purchasing a new dress, asking the email recipient how the dress looked on her.
- A string of 20 emails referencing a “Kenmore Mini Fridge” negotiation over Craigslist.
- An email thanking the recipient for advice concerning the purchase of a Benelli over/under shotgun at Dick’s.
- An email between parents discussing a daughter’s need for an OB-GYN.
- An email regarding prescription medications needed.
- A series of Google Chat logs between friends covering a variety of private topics, including whether the writer needs “to lose 20 lbs asap.”
- Several emails between family members circulating drafts and
corrections to a Christmas letter.The Department of Justice’s review of these emails did not find any unethical or illegal behavior by “any state official, employee, or other Wisconsin Republican apparently targeted in John Doe III.”
DOJ investigators believe the leak to the Guardian was calculated to attempt to influence a U.S. Supreme Court decision on whether to take up John Doe prosecutors request for review of the state court’s decision shutting down the investigation – and whether they could hold onto the possessions they illegally took. The Guardian hit piece, with hundreds of pages of cherry-picked court documents, was published just days before the court unanimously rejected the case.
Sloppy disregard for the security of the court-sealed John Doe documents – at the GAB and at the state Supreme Court office – left the DOJ unable to identify beyond a reasonable doubt who had access to the records, when the records where accessed or “who stole them,” according to the report.
Here’s the scary footnote to a frightening report on government abuse: The Department of Justice cannot assure any John Doe II or III target that information illegally seized from them “will not be published on the Internet or by The Guardian at some future date.”
“Nor can DOJ assure any person whose information was gathered that they will not suffer from identity theft or face other adverse consequences as a result of the irresponsible way that GAB handled personal information,” the report states.
Everyone who was involved in this miscarriage of justice who is still employed by state government should be fired. Everyone who was involved in this miscarriage of justice should be sued by their victims. Everyone who was involved in this miscarriage of justice who has a law degree should be disbarred. Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm needs to be removed from office.
Most of the media that allegedly covers state government decided to ignore this story, as David Blaska points out:
Thank the Good Lord for Brad Schimel, the first conservative state attorney general in long memory. Thank you the heavens above for the too few brave souls — Eric O’Keefe, the Wall Street Journal, Vicki McKenna (her interview with Schimel), and Matt Kittle (his report) among them — for speaking out against the government gag orders. …
What was the crime being investigated by the Government Accountability Board and its agents in the Milwaukee and Dane County district attorneys offices?
The crime was this: one group of citizens “colluding” with another group of citizens on matters of their governance before an election. Just as the Act 10 opposition had done before the Walker/State Senate Recalls.
The John Doe was not an investigation, it was a persecution. The government — acting in secrecy with full police powers — intimidated, prosecuted, and selectively targeted political speech with which they disagreed. …
Had the victims of this oppressed speech been Black Lives Matter or the Socialist Workers Party, the Wisconsin State Journal and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel would have been in full howl. The ACLU would file lawsuits. Garrulous old Neil Heinen would steam like a teapot. The Madison Common Council would issue a pronunciamento. John Nichols would blow into his bullhorn in front of the Monument to Communism in James Madison Park. Ambulances would be halted on John Nolen Drive. Tammy Baldwin would write a campaign fund-raising letter.
But it was just a bunch of conservatives — white, at that. Anyone who complained was guilty of “whining,” according to former State Journal columnist Chris Rickert.
Wisconsin Democrats need to ask themselves how they would feel if Schimel or Republican district attorneys were secretly investigating their own political activities.
Facebook Friend Michael Smith wrote this, which is pertinent after Facebook reaction to yesterday’s post:
You have to love discussing tax cuts with a progressive. I can’t seem to get any of my Democrat friends to tell me how a cut in tax rates across the board amounts to “redistributing wealth upward” or how the GOP is stealing from the poor to give to the rich when the poor don’t pay income taxes to start with.
It’s about statolatry – the literal worship of government. Democrats literally love government the way Christians love Christ.
They ascribe all that is good and holy to the government.
Without government, how will we know what to do? Who will tell us what is right and what is wrong if there is nobody to make laws? WIthout government, who will protect us from each other?
Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!
Fear of smaller government is irrational and an indication of a lack of self-confidence. It is the ultimate form of low self esteem, that one cannot live without someone telling them how. One wonders if such a position is a result of actually wanting to be a member of the collective or just a fear of being alone.
Minnesota Public Radio reports:
A Democratic official who has spoken to Al Franken and key aides says Franken will resign his Minnesota Senate seat on Thursday, the official tells MPR News.
The official spoke to Franken and separately to Franken’s staff. A staff member told the official that Franken had gone to his Washington home to discuss his plans with family.
MPR News agreed to withhold the official’s name because the official wanted to give Franken the chance to talk about his decision in his own words.
Franken faced a cascade of calls Wednesday from fellow Democrats and other political allies to leave office in response to multiple allegations of sexual harassment.
After MPR News reported the planned resignation, a tweet from Franken’s official account said it was “not accurate.”
“No final decision has been made and the senator is still talking with his family,” the tweet read.
In terms of the balance of power in the Senate, this will have no effect. Dayton, a member of Minnesota’s Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party, isn’t going to name a Republican (that is, member of the Independent–Republican Party) to fill Franken’s seat. My guess would be U.S. Rep. Keith Ellison (D–Minnesota). Whoever is picked, should that person choose to run for the rest of Franken’s unfinished term, will be on the ballot with whoever decides to run against U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D … oops, DFL–Minnesota), whose term expires after the 2018 election.
For what it’s worth, I loathe Franken. He wasn’t the least bit funny on “Saturday Night Live,” he got elected to the Senate via vote fraud, and apparently he’s as much of a pig in private life as he is a jerk in public life. Good riddance.
The number one British album today in 1963 will be at number one for 21 weeks — “Meet the Beatles”:
The number one single here today in 1963 certainly was not a traditional pop song:
Today in 1967, Otis Redding recorded a song before heading on a concert tour that included Madison:
The number one British album today in 1968 was the Beatles’ “White Album”:
The number one British single today in 1974 was originally a country song:
See the comment from 1963 about the number one single today in 1974:
The number one song today in 1985:
The number one British song today in 1991:
The number one album today in 1991 was U2’s “Achtung Baby”:
The number one single today in 2003:
Only one birthday of note today: Tom Waits, whose voice was described as “like it was soaked in a vat of bourbon, left hanging in the smokehouse for a few months, and then taken outside and run over with a car” makes him better known as writing for others:
This week, Republicans in the Senate finally passed their long-awaited tax reform plan. It lowers individual income tax rates across the board, although it does claw back some government revenue in the form of elimination of state and local tax deductions. It drops corporate tax rates as well. It is, in other words, a significant but not atypical Republican tax cut designed to boost economic growth by allowing Americans to keep more of their own money.
The tax cut will almost certainly increase the deficit, however. Even with dynamic scoring — the assumption that the economy will grow at a faster clip thanks to tax cuts — the tax cuts could lead to $1 trillion in lower revenue through 2027. This has led some conservatives to sour on tax reform altogether, rightly saying that Republicans were, until a few months ago, complaining incessantly about former President Obama’s blowout deficits and the burgeoning national debt, which now stands at a cool $20.5 trillion. That doesn’t include long-term unfunded liabilities, which are slated to bring the debt to some $70 to 75 trillion in coming decades.
So, which is more important: cutting deficits or cutting taxes?
The answer, in the long run, is obvious: cutting deficits. Deficits impoverish future generations; they undermine the credibility of our financial commitments; they prevent us from fulfilling promises we have already made to our own citizens. There are already millions of Americans who will never receive Social Security in the amount they have been promised; there are already millions of Americans unborn who will spend their lives paying off the commitments made by others for political gain.
At the same time, were we to raise taxes to pay off our debts, we would enervate our population and inure citizens to high taxes. Citizens of European states are used to insanely high tax rates; the impetus for spending cuts based on desire for lower taxes disappears after years of habituation to those tax rates and unsustainable government benefits. Europeans are used to the very social programs that continue to bankrupt them despite high tax rates; they’re not clamoring to cut programs based on their distaste for those tax rates.
This puts American politicians in somewhat of a Catch-22. If they stump for spending cuts, they’re cast as uncaring and cruel; if they stump for tax increases to pay for those spending cuts, they’re cast as uncaring and cruel. Thus, the deficit continues to grow.
So, what should Republicans do about it? They ought to cut taxes, and then they ought to acknowledge that cuts are necessary to keep taxes low. Let Americans get used to keeping their own money. Let them understand that services aren’t free. Then, be honest about the costs associated with big government programs.
In the end, both Democrats and Republicans will have to face a simple truth: It’s either government cuts or bust. There’s no reason for Republicans to give away their only leverage — the taste of the public for a dynamic economy based on individuals retaining their earnings — in order to shore up programs Democrats will only work to expand.
If you had to live in Minnesota, next year would be interesting, because you would vote for two senators, the term of U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D–Minnesota) ends after 2018, and then you’d be voting for the governor-chosen successor or someone else to finish Franken’s term.
I loathe Franken, so I’m glad he’s (reportedly) gone. It’s hardly surprising he’s as much of a pig in private as he was a jerk in public. Before the Senate he was an unfunny writer and actor on NBC-TV’s “Saturday Night Live.” This is the same state that voted in a professional wrestler as governor, though. Perhaps political idiocy is why both sides of my father’s side of the family left Minnesota for Wisconsin.
James Wigderson reports on the latest Democrat caught in #metoo:
State Rep. Josh Zepnick (D-Milwaukee) was accused Friday of kissing women against their will in two separate incidents at Democratic Party events. Democratic Party leaders are calling on Zepnick to step down but he has said he will not resign.
According to the Cap Times, the first incident occurred at a 2011 Recall Election party for a state senate candidate. By then, apparently, Zepnick already had a reputation. The Cap Times reported the story of the legislative staffer:
“We were in a huge room with a ton of supporters and people were drinking,” she said. “I remember I was on the left side of the room and he walked over to say hello, but this time he also grabbed my shoulders and he kissed me. Up until that point, his interactions with me had been entirely professional.”
She said she doesn’t remember whether his lips landed on her mouth or her cheek. She does remember feeling disgust and trying to “get away from him as soon as possible.” She recalls he was “pretty drunk,” so drunk that she’s not sure he would remember his behavior. She said she thinks other people witnessed it, but isn’t sure who, specifically, would have seen it.
The incident was not reported at the time because, the alleged victim told the Cap Times, she did not know if she could report it since it happened after business hours at a social function. However, others corroborated her story, according to the Cap Times, by saying that she refused to be near him after the incident.
The second incident, according to the Cap Times, occurred at the state Democratic Party’s 2015 convention held at the Potawatomi Hotel and Casino in Milwaukee. The Cap Times reported that the incident occurred after a heated exchange between then-state Rep. Mandela Barnes (D-Milwaukee) and Zepnick in Sen. Tammy Baldwin’s hospitality suite. The Cap Times does not report what the disagreement was about, just that the two men had to be separated.
Barnes is currently a Democratic candidate for Lt. Governor. It is unknown whether the loss of temper by Barnes was an isolated incident or not, or what incited the former legislator that he had to be watched by Democratic staffers, as the Cap Times reported, while he calmed down.
Zepnick was taken to the lobby by a Democratic staff member to try to get him to an exit when the incident allegedly occurred, according to the Cap Times.
“We’re in the hotel lobby and he’s just, kind of like drunk people just retell the same story over and over, he keeps telling me he’s not going to drive drunk,” the woman said. “But we’re standing in the lobby and he gives me a hug and then he kisses me, and I just turn my head and I’m like, ‘What the f—?’ And he’s so gross, and I’m upset.
Everyone was upset — or at least annoyed — that night, said a friend of the woman’s who had been working with others to try to defuse the altercation. But when the DPW staffer rejoined her co-workers after dealing with Zepnick, he said, she was crying.
He remembers the way she described it — like Zepnick had licked her face as a result of her turning her head to dodge the kiss. He remembers being shocked, and then angry. His anger resurfaced, still fresh as he described the night.
Two other then-co-workers, both of whom still work in Wisconsin politics, confirmed that she was visibly upset when she returned to the room where they were gathered, and that she told them Zepnick had “gotten weird” and kissed her.
“I was in tears, thinking, ‘What the f—, I hate my job, I hate that I have to deal with these f—ing people who just — who does that? You can’t kiss me,’” she said.
Zepnick was arrested in October 2015 for drunk driving. Prior to his arrest, Zepnick was demonstrating erratic behavior that prompted former Milwaukee talk show host Charlie Sykes to ask Zepnick if the state representative was drinking when he posted a boycott threat against a local business that opposed the Milwaukee streetcar.
Zepnick told the Cap Times that, as a recovering alcoholic, he has been sober for two years. Zepnick claims that he does not remember the incidents, was never confronted with the incidents until Friday, but apologized to the two women for the alleged incidents.
The apology is not good enough for Democratic leadership who called on Zepnick to resign. Assembly Minority Leader Gordon Hintz (D-Oshkosh) issued a statement on Twitter:
The Assembly Democratic Leadership Statement on Rep. Josh Zepnick. pic.twitter.com/mIIHfjVxz2
— Gordon Hintz (@GordonHintz) December 2, 2017
Hintz’s statement that those who “have been made to feel uncomfortable or unsafe will always have our full support” given that he once threatened a female colleague during the Act 10 debate on the Assembly floor by saying, “you’re f–k–g dead!” Hintz’s record on respect for women is questionable considering he was once arrested for solicitation of prostitution at a massage parlor. The incidents involving Hintz occured in roughly the same time frame as those involving Zepnick.
Democratic Party Chairman Martha Laning has also called for Zepnick’s resignation. “In light of these serious and corroborated charges against Rep. Zepnick, and high standards to which we hold our public officials, we ask that Rep. Zepnick immediately step down,” Laning said in a statement. Laning has not issued any statements regarding Hintz.
State Rep. Dana Wachs (D-La Crosse), a Democratic candidate for governor, also called on Zepnick to step down. “These staffers should be safe and comfortable with the knowledge that they will not be harassed or assaulted,” Wachs said in a statement. As a Democratic member of the Assembly, Wachs was part of the unanimous vote to elect Hintz as minority leader, despite Hintz threatening a female colleague.
Assembly Democrats have not said that they will seek to remove Zepnick from office. In 2010, Assembly Democrats blocked Republican efforts to remove then-state Rep. Jeff Woods (I-Plover) after his fifth arrest for driving under the influence. Woods was a former Republican legislator who caucused with the Democrats at the time of the third, fourth and fifth arrests.
Democrats have also not said if they will be returning campaign contributions from Zepnick in light of the alleged sexual harassment incidents. Since 2008, Zepnick has made nearly $10,000 in contributions to various political campaigns and campaign committees. The contributions include $986 to the Assembly Democratic Campaign Committee, $435 to Rep. Steve Doyle (D-Onalaska), $202 to state Sen. Tim Carpenter (D-Milwaukee), $200 to state Rep. Christine Sinicki (D-Milwaukee), $150 to state Rep. JoCasta Zamarripa (D-Milwaukee), $50 to state Rep. Jonathan Brostoff (D-Milwaukee), and $85 to the Democratic Party of Wisconsin.
Zepnick also gave $100 to Jefferson County District Attorney Susan Happ, a former Democratic candidate for state Attorney General and a possible Democratic candidate for governor in 2018.
Why, one wonders, is Democratic leadership trying to get Zepnick to quit and not Hintz? Does Zepnick not sing from the Dem0cratic hymnal sufficiently? That would be like excusing the behavior of U.S. Sen. Al Franken (D–Minnesota), wouldn’t it?
The number one British single today in 1967:
Today in 1968, the Nelson Riddle Orchestra backed The Doors for the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour on CBS:
The number one single today in 1969:
On that day, a free festival in Altamont, Calif., featured the Rolling Stones, Jefferson Airplane, Santana, the Flying Burrito Brothers and Crosby Stills Nash & Young.
When the allegations about Bill O’Reilly and Roger Ailes came out, the mainstream media had a field day. But there was no larger feeding frenzy. Last year it was a “Fox News” story, not a “societal problem” story. It took the Harvey Weinstein allegations to get the mainstream press to start asking uncomfortable questions about its own institutions. I can think of several reasons for this, but one that stands out is the tribalism of media itself.
The Fox stories confirmed, to one extent or another, what a lot of mainstream liberals think about Fox or about conservatives generally: They’re retrograde. They’re bad. That’s the kind of thing that goes on over there.
It’s related to what some reporters I know at Fox call the “Fox News effect” (not to be confused with some blather from David Brock using the same term). If Fox goes hard at an important story, a lot of other outlets will reflexively go soft on it. I’m sure the folks at the Media Research Center can produce the total minutes Fox dedicated to Fast and Furious, Benghazi, Lois Lerner’s IRS, the VA, etc., compared with the other cable news networks or the broadcast newscasts. This isn’t to say that Fox doesn’t occasionally over-cover or under-cover some stories too. There’s no scientific formula for how much airtime or resources any particular story should get, and from the outset Fox has prided itself on not reflexively following the lead of the New York Times on every news event.
But back to the sexual-harassment thing. One of my longstanding gripes is how when conservatives do something bad, it’s proof of the inherent badness of conservatives and conservatism. But when liberals do something bad, it is immediately turned into an indictment of America itself. Joe McCarthy’s excesses were a window into the nature of conservatism, according to historians, intellectuals, and journalists. But when liberals — Attorney General Palmer, Woodrow Wilson, et al. — did far worse, the villain was America itself. When conservatives are racist, it is because they are conservatives. When liberals are racist it is because racism is an “American sin.” In other words, liberalism is never wrong. I could go on at length about this.
Similarly, the sexual-harassment story is now being covered — largely correctly by my lights — as an American story, not a story about liberals. Again, that’s fine. But three points come to mind.
First, is it crazy to think that there’s a problem specific to liberalism at work here? I mean this all started with Harvey Weinstein, and he first thought he could survive the scandal by promising to go after the NRA. Where did he get that idea? Maybe because he had good reason to think it would work?
Perhaps there are a lot of liberal men who think they can buy indulgences by toeing the party line on equal pay and Title IX, and emptying their bladders over things like Mitt Romney’s “binders full of women.” To be fair, in recent weeks, quite a few liberals have been coming to grips with the fact that Bill Clinton survived the exposure of his predations precisely because he bought such indulgences. It’s worth remembering that he even admitted that sexual misbehavior should take a backseat to winning when he chastised Donna Shalala, his HHS secretary, for criticizing his behavior — at a cabinet meeting set up to let Clinton apologize for his behavior:
The participants said Shalala rejected what she took as Clinton’s implication that policies and programs were more important than whether he provided moral leadership.
“And then she said something like, ‘I can’t believe that is what you’re telling us, that is what you believe, that you don’t have an obligation to provide moral leadership,’” one participant recalled.
“She said something like ‘I don’t care about the lying, but I’m appalled at the behavior.’ And frankly, he [Clinton] whacked her, let her have it,” this source said. The president told Shalala that if her logic had prevailed in 1960, Richard M. Nixon would have been elected president instead of John F. Kennedy, the source said. After that, no other Cabinet member had anything critical to say, the participant added.
The second point is the reverse. The stories of sexual harassment at Fox were entirely newsworthy and legitimate on the merits. But not because Fox is “right wing.” Yet it seems fairly obvious to me that the press enjoyed the Ailes and O’Reilly stories precisely because they involved toppling someone else’s icons. Where there was barely constrained glee in the voices of many pundits and reporters when it came to exposing the sins of Ailes and O’Reilly, there’s equally obvious remorse when it comes to Matt Lauer, Mark Halperin, NPR’s David Sweeney, and, obviously, Bill Clinton. It speaks well of the media that it’s reporting these things anyway. But it would be a good thing for the press to meditate on what that remorse (and glee) says about its own tribalism.
Last, it’s simply worth pointing out that many conservatives have now embraced the Clinton position. Substitute John F. Kennedy for Donald Trump and you have precisely the argument that Clinton made to Donna Shalala, only now many conservatives are making it. Likewise, with Roy Moore. Winning is more important than literally anything Roy Moore has said or has allegedly done. It seems that, just like sexual harassment, no party has a monopoly on cynical expediency. The problem lies not in ideology but in human nature.
The number one album today in 1960 was Elvis Presley’s “G.I. Blues” …
… which is probably unrelated to what Beatles Paul McCartney and Pete Best did in West Germany that day: They were arrested for pinning a condom to a brick wall and igniting it. Their sentence was deportation.
The number one single today in 1964 (really):
The number one single today in 1965 wasn’t a single:
The number one British single today in 1981:
The number one British single today in 2004 …
… was a remake of the original:
The number one British album today in 2004 was U2’s “How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb”:
So who shares a birthday with our youngest son? “Little Richard” Penniman:
Eduardo Delgado of ? and the Mysterians:
Jim Messina of Buffalo Springfield and Loggins and Messina:
Jack Russell of Great White …
… was born the same day as Les Nemes of Haircut 100:
Two deaths of note today: Doug Hopkins, cofounder of the Gin Blossoms, in 1993 …
… and in 1791, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart:
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 