News & Articles

Scott Walker can’t seem to run a clean campaign.
He first won the governorship of Wisconsin in 2010 from his position as Milwaukee Country executive. But it turns out that some of his aides at the county job were doing campaign work for him on the taxpayers’ dime – and three of them were convicted of crimes for that bit of shiftiness.
Now, Walker himself – along with another set of aides and a slew of corporate and right-wing front groups – is in another money mess. State prosecutors have caught Walker & Company laundering illegal corporate donations and out-of-state dark money into his desperate $45 million campaign in 2012 to survive a recall election. They conspired to take millions of dollars from such “independent” spending groups as Club for Growth and the Koch brothers’ shifty outfit, Americans for Prosperity, illegally and secretly putting this gusher of cash under the control of Walker’s machine.
Having been caught laundering, Walker promptly switched to the spin cycle. I’m a victim of partisan Democratic prosecutors, he wails, calling the investigation an abuse of the judicial system. Indeed, he says starchily, even a federal judge has ruled that no laws were broken, and he told prosecutors stop the investigation and destroy the evidence they’ve collected.
Destroy the evidence? Who is this judge? He is Rudolph T. Randa, who was a staunch Republican partisan when he was rewarded with a judgeship in 1992 by George H.W. Bush. More telling about his bias, however, is that Randa is the only federal district judge in Wisconsin who is a regular on the circuit of right-wing judicial junkets. And who pays for those junkets? The Koch brothers.
To keep up with this fast-spinning saga of Scott Walker’s campaign corruption, connect to the Center for Media and Democracy: www.prwatch.org.

“Gov. Walker’s Campaign Violations,” The New York Times, June 21, 2014.
“Wisconsin Governor at Center Of a Vast Fund-Raising Case,” The New York Times, June 20, 2014.

“Walker wins Wisconsin recall election flooded with outside spending,” www.publicintegrity.org, June 5 2012.

“Meet The Republican Judge Fighting To Bail Scott Walker Out Of A Criminal Investigation,” www.thinkprogress.org, May 11, 2014.

Cheney swings at Obama but hits himself

President Obama has been hit with a firestorm of vitriolic criticism from Republican opportunists hoping to score political points by blaming him for the latest upheaval in Iraq. So I was pleased when, finally, one Republican spoke out loudly to deflect those partisan attacks.
Thank you, Dick Cheney. Yes, he’s back! The snarling, self-righteous, shameless old hypocrite wrote a nasty op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that was meant to skewer Obama on the Iraq issue, but it backfired! One, Cheney’s attack was so vitriolic and personal – even accusing Obama of betrayal and being “a fool” – that it revealed just how mean and malignantly-partisan Cheney is. More significantly, though, his venomous rant reminded everyone that – wait a minute – it wasn’t Obama who made a ghastly mess of Iraq – it was Cheney and his imperious regime of neo-con chicken-hawks!
The punch line in his op-ed was a haymaker intended to floor Obama: “Rarely has a US president been so wrong about so much at the expense of so many.” But – whammo! – it was such a wild swing that instead of socking Obama, Cheney’s roundhouse punch went full-circle and smashed into his own glass jaw. Even Fox News, which had been a wildly enthusiastic backer of Cheney’s war, roasted him over that line. Fox interviewer Megyn Kelly put it to him like this: “Time and time again, history has proven that you got it wrong as well in Iraq, sir. You said there was no doubt Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. You said we would be greeted as liberators. You said the Iraq insurgency was in the last throes back in 2005… What do you say to those who say you were so wrong about so much at the expense of so many?”
Precisely, right. So thank you again, Dick Cheney, for taking the heat off of Obama and putting right were it belongs.

“The Collapsing Obama Doctrine,” www.wsj.com, June 17, 2014.

“Megyn Kelly grills Dick Cheney: ‘History has proven that you got it wrong in Iraq,’” www.yahoo.com, June 19, 2014.