Yesterday, Schultz revealed details of his very own mining bill.  Rather than working from the Assembly version, it appears Schultz started with current law and may have actually made it worse.   Assembly Republicans had nothing good to say about Schultz’s so called “compromise.”

Assembly Speaker Jeff Fitzgerald (R-Horicon), Assembly Majority Leader Scott Suder (R–Abbotsford) and Joint Finance Co-Chair Robin Vos (R-Rochester) issued the following statement regarding Schultz’s bill:

 “We need a bill that is going to bring mining back to the state of Wisconsin and create thousands of jobs for struggling workers statewide.  On its face, the Schultz-Jauch proposal is based largely on a substitute amendment that was already rejected by the Assembly because it ensures that no company will ever do business here. 

“Assembly Republicans are open to working with the Senate on a compromise that will ensure the future of mining in our state, but tax increases and legal red tape that will deny Wisconsin thousands of jobs and billions of dollars in revenue are non-starters in this house.”  

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, having it both ways, came up with a disingenuous story about Republican “moderates” reaching for compromise. Too bad the compromise allows the greens to contrive endless regulatory delays.

Meanwhile—you have to wonder where he finds the time—Schultz has teamed up with colleague Tim Cullen (D-Janesville) to sell a proposal handing over legislative redistricting powers to—drum roll, please—a nonpartisan commission.

Think Government Accountability Board, but with a better chance of getting away with doing whatever it wants.

Just to clarify, derailing the mining bill and making redistricting even worse are about neither mining nor redistricting. They’re about pandering for favorable attention from the Liberal media, a full-time preoccupation for Schultz since he first became a legislator in 1982.

On Friday, Judge David Flanagan will reconsider a motion for a temporary injunction blocking enforcement of the law.  Earlier this month Flanagan declined to issue the injunction requested by NAACP attorneys, saying they’d failed to show voter ID would do irreparable harm.  They get Friday’s do-over because they say they have new testimony.

Anyway, a trial on the NAACP’s lawsuit to overturn voter ID is scheduled in April.

It’s one of three lawsuits by groups who deserve public scorn for embracing the fundamentally absurd proposition that a lesser standard of proof of eligibility should be required to decide who runs the government than to rent a movie.

That the prolonged struggle to enact voter ID was worthwhile has been repeatedly demonstrated in recent weeks.

• Analysis by a private citizens’ group revealed errors in more than one-third of all Milwaukee County Election Day voter registrations for the 2011 spring elections.
• Local clerks found changes in the Government Accountability Board’s statewide database and faulty census data placed a number of voters in the wrong legislative districts and—somehow—even outside the United States.
• Last week, the Pew Center on the States said it found that voter lists are a mess nationwide.

One in eight active registrations is invalid or inaccurate. At the same time, one in four people who are eligible to vote — at least 51 million potential voters — are not registered.

The report found that there are about 1.8 million dead people listed as active voters. Some 2.8 million people have active registrations in more than one state. And 12 million registrations have errors serious enough to make it unlikely that mailings based on them will reach voters.

It’s true that voter ID by itself can’t solve all the problems acknowledged by the Pew Center. It’s also true that without voter ID, nothing else that’s done to address those problems will matter.

The Rock County Republican Party held its annual Lincoln Day Dinner February 11.  A local businessman who evidently remains purposefully apolitical, was invited to speak about his company’s ongoing project to take World War II veterans, at no cost, to see their memorials in Washington, D.C.

Because the occasion was a Republican Party event, thugs lay in waiting to abuse the attendees and interfere with them entering the building.  According to the Beloit Daily News, some protesters recognized the guest speaker and started the inevitable chant about boycotting his business.

Accompanying the businessman were a few veterans, all in their 80s. The protesters screamed abuse in their faces, one using a bullhorn.

We only hope none of these barbarians spend their weekdays teaching the children of Rock County in the public schools. But even that is a secondary concern.

The real worry is that the so-called mainstream media will continue to blackout anything that might reflect unfavorably on the Leftist coup now stalking Wisconsin.

Control of Wisconsin government is in serious jeopardy of being seized by people so indecent, so intellectually corrupt, so totally self-absorbed that they would physically intimidate elderly veterans. They make no effort to conceal what they really are, but they hardly need to. With the honorable exception of the Beloit Daily News, the despicable media cover it up.

It would have been impossible for the GAB to find and redact this woman’s information as the petitions are not currently available in a searchable database format.  Redacting all address information would make it impossible for groups and individuals to find fraudulent entries among the more than one million petitions filed.

Fred Young of Racine was among the silent majority who spoke up and who called out the GAB:

Kevin Kennedy,

Your announcement of refusal to allow citizen groups to check the authenticity of the Walker recall petitions is unacceptable.  Your stated reason for withholding the petitions is a fig leaf.  Recall fraud prevention and citizens’ right to access of public records trump stalker victim fear.

You post my partisan political contributions on-line for the world to see.  Nomination papers are public.  Partisan recall petitions should be posted as well. 

You posted the petitions for the nine recalls last year.  You posted the petitions for Lt. Gov. and four state Senators this month.

To withhold a million signatures to honor the request of one stalked person and a few who just don’t want their name published is to ignore entrenched precedent as well as to violate citizens’ right of access to public records.  If a person doesn’t want their name seen, they shouldn’t make campaign contributions, sign nomination papers or support recall petitions.

Going forward, what will prevent massive fraud in future recalls if recallers know the GAB doesn’t check for fraud and will prevent citizen groups from checking for fraud.  Katie bar the door!

I don’t want to be disrespectful, but the Saul Alinsky “whatever it takes” behavior in Madison makes me angry.

Fred Young

Anybody who’ s spent time in Northern Wisconsin knows the economy in that part of the state has been pretty much a hand-to-mouth affair for decades. It’s a wonderful place to live, provided you can find steady work.  At the opposite end of the state, the metal-bending industries of Southeast Wisconsin have seen manufacturing jobs wither away just as government everywhere has ballooned.

For these two remote but integrally connected poles of the Wisconsin economy, the new iron-mining venture Assembly Republicans and the Walker administration hope to secure, would mean a private-sector capital infusion of at least a billion dollars and jobs at every skill level, precisely when and where they’re needed most.

Last week, the Party that always claims it’s looking out for the little guy flatly rejected this. Given a clear choice between thousands of family-supporting jobs and cozying up to well-heeled, full-time environmentalists, Democrats—unanimously—told their blue-collar constituency to drop dead.

A large contingent of American blue-collar voters didn’t come to be called “Reagan Democrats” for no reason. One big reason is the sort of thing enviro-Democrats did in the Wisconsin Assembly last week.  For the moment, Republicans don’t need any help from Democrats to enact laws encouraging job creation.  Blue collar workers should never forget who’s trying to stop them.

That’s pretty much what we said last week and before our posting was a day old it proved to be true all over again. Last Thursday the Illinois Policy institute came out with a report that their state’s unemployment rate had increased more than that of any other state in 2011.

Then on Sunday, an op-ed in the Chicago Sun-Times even more pointedly referred to the stark contrast between Illinois’ predicament and Wisconsin’s reforms.

Illinois state government has gained virtually nothing from these huge tax increases because soaring government pension costs — costs vehemently defended by the state’s unionized government employees — are consuming much of the extra money.

The big problem is Illinois government’s futile struggle to keep its predicament rolling along instead of facing the necessity of fixing it.

Governor Pat Quinn, who started off 2011 with massive tax increases—his preferred alternative to Walker-style reforms—delivers his state-of-the-state message to the Illinois Legislature this evening. It will be interesting to hear how he spins the massive failures of 2011 to the lawmakers who helped him make them happen.

The bad news is that big unions are preparing to drain their checkbooks this year in Wisconsin recall campaigns.

No, that’s not a typo. It’s both good and bad news that Wisconsin continues to be the ground on which pivotal battles will be fought.  Liberals, literally from coast to coast, are fretting that they might be squandering money in their attempt to take over this state—money they’d otherwise be spending in this fall’s attempt to entrench their collectivist takeover of the whole country.

We first heard that story last summer. Now it’s been repeated in a Washington, D.C. publication that’s pretty friendly toward Liberals.

The normal people of Wisconsin have been presented with a challenge they never asked for: to stand in defense of the kind of government reforms that were needed to rescue this state from bankruptcy—and that are still needed to rescue the whole nation from bankruptcy.  It is a sobering challenge and a deadly serious one.

It’s encouraging to know the reforms that triggered this battle are working and that it’s being noticed.

It’s a rare thing to recognize a decisive moment in history before it occurs. And recognizing such a moment, few might relish the prospect of being personally caught up in it—until after the fight’s over and they’ve won. Of course there’s always the little matter of having to win.

Short-term, we’re all getting an education from the reform plans—or more accurately from Democrats trying create clouds of suspicion over them.

Here’s State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Evers, as quoted by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: “I have not been involved in the drafting of the education proposals that have been announced.”

Evidently the “nonpartisan” Superintendent forgot he put together one of the three task forces that generated recommendations for the reforms. And that the specifics of legislation in drafting are always held in confidence between legislative sponsors and the Legislative Reference Bureau. That’s one way the Bureau stays nonpartisan.

Another task force participant—who doesn’t even pretend to be nonpartisan—detected evil intent in bills she hasn’t even read. State Rep. Sondy Pope-Roberts (D-Middleton) just knows it’s all bad:  “I have not yet seen the legislation being drafted by the Governor and the Republican leaders and am very concerned that the bipartisan efforts that have come from this group’s work thus far are being hijacked for political gain.”

If anybody’s seeking political gain, it looks to us like the people who participated in putting together the reform proposals and are now denouncing them before they’re even introduced. Pope-Roberts went so far as to accuse the Governor of mandating programs without funding them, something he specifically said was important not to do. Even the Journal Sentinel managed to report that much.

So in one sense, the reforms are already adding to our store of knowledge: We now have a better understanding of Madison Liberals’ concept of integrity.

Ah, statistics. You know what they say about them: statistics can be tortured to confirm anything you want to prove. Democrats are trying to prove that Governor Walker is failing at job creation. They can find some numbers that might seem to help their argument, but it’s a very dangerous game for them to play.

Start with the numbers that, according to Democrats, show Wisconsin has lost jobs in each of the last six months. They love numbers like that because everybody knows Wisconsin lost so many jobs when they were in charge, more people wound up working for government than in manufacturing.  States, indeed whole nations, go broke that way.  Never mind; the Democrats’ idea of a positive program is to argue that the guy who replaced them is just as bad as they were.

Except he’s not.

The Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development (DWD), which doesn’t get to make things up, reports that the number of people working in Wisconsin rose by almost 7,000 in December compared with November, and by more than 21,000 compared with December 2010.

Wisconsin’s unemployment rate is better than those of Illinois, Indiana, Michigan and Ohio.

We mentioned that this is a very dangerous game for Democrats to play. That’s because when you trash someone else’s performance you invite comparison.  The DWD reported that Wisconsin’s unemployment rate dropped to 7.1 percent, from 7.3 percent the previous month and 7.5 percent the month before that.  Why is that dangerous for Democrats? Because the nationwide unemployment rate is 8.5 percent and it’s their guy who owns that number.

In a Friday editorial, theJournal noted that even after massive tax increases enacted to avoid the kind of reforms adopted in Wisconsin, Illinois state finances are still a mess, the state’s credit rating was downgraded to the lowest in the nation, and the most prized possession of reform opponents, government employee pensions, are underfunded by more than half.

Last Thursday, Chicago’s WBBM Radio reported that state government simply isn’t paying its bills and regardless of the tax hikes that were supposed to put Illinois back on a sound financial footing, there’s no sign of things getting anything but worse.

WBBM reported that some state lawmakers are suggesting the solution is to borrow more money. That will be even more difficult—or at least more expensive for taxpayers— thanks to the endless parade of previous legislative actions destroying the state’s credit.

Sunday’s Chicago Tribune weighed in with an editorial spelling out that the balanced-budget-through-higher-taxes ploy was a load of bunk and named the lawmakers who voted for it, urging citizens to retaliate at the polls.

Watch for “The Simpsons” one of these weeks to come up with a joke about Illinois state government being hard to reach because “they live in their car.”

And remember Democrats were driving Wisconsin down the same road a little more than a year ago.