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The Ivory Tower Falls on Business

The talk of the Capitol last week was an editorial written in Madison Magazine by outgoing UW-Madison Chancellor John Wiley, in which he launched an ad hominem attack against the state’s largest business group, Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce.  In his commentary, Wiley squawks about how WMC, through their efforts to support candidates that align with their low-tax agenda, are somehow responsible for the “toxic” tone of politics in Wisconsin today. 

In the editorial, Wiley bemoans “fifteen years of cuts” to the University of Wisconsin system, without ever offering any evidence of how WMC is responsible for these imagined “cuts.”  As explained on the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute blog:
 

According to the Legislative Fiscal Bureau, the total UW budget was $2.5 billion in 1996-97. By 2006-07, just 10 years later, the total system budget had ballooned to $4.3 billion, an average increase of 5.7% per year over a decade. Of that budget, state general purpose revenue increased every year from 1996-97 ($844 million) to 2002-03 ($1.08 billion), until Governor Jim Doyle proposed cutting $250 million from the system over a two-year period. (Shame on WMC for getting Doyle elected.) By 2006-07, state aid had increased to 1.04 billion per year, with the Legislature granting campuses the authority to levy $909 million in tuition - more than twice the $400 million they collected in 1996-97.
 

Furthermore, Wiley never establishes a link between these ficticious cuts and WMC’s political activity.  Basically, he says that WMC supports candidates who like lower taxes, and those candidates tend to be conservative, and conservatives tend to like things like traditional marriage and the Second Amendment, so WMC must therefore be responsible for all these horrible right wing proposals.  Apparently, Wiley is completely oblivious to groups like casino interests and the teachers’ union, who spend millions of dollars to elect their left-wing candidates.  Apparently, they play no role whatsoever in today’s toxic politics.

In fact, just this week, the left-wing group One Wisconsin Now coincidentally sent 10,000 e-mails to Wisconsin companies, urging them to withold contributions to WMC, in an effort to prevent the group from having the resources necessary to support candidates who support lower taxes.  Wiley’s screed, coupled with other liberal attacks on the business community, smacks of a coordinated attempt to silence those who support letting taxpayers keep more of their own money.
 

In his commentary, Wiley claims that spending a paltry $4 billion per year on the University of Wisconsin System could lead Wisconsin to become a “third world” state.  Let’s just hope the students the UW educates turn out smarter than those we choose to lead them.

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Same Fraud, Different Day

The last two Club for Growth newsletters have featured accounts of the illegal voter registration efforts from the left-wing group ACORN.

Unfortunately, this week’s edition is back with yet another update, as 32 more ACORN workers have been forwarded to the Milwaukee County District Attorney for investigation.  At this rate, the CFG newsletter will be covering voter fraud on a weekly basis until 2018.

 

According to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, of the new round of the 32 alleged vote thieves:

• Seventeen apparently filled out voter applications and then signed the cards themselves. That involved two to four cards in each case.
   

• Twelve submitted cards for individuals who later told ACORN they never filled out an application. That involved one card in each case.
  
   
• One submitted a card for a dead voter. That was the second such case; a Voters Project worker previously submitted a card for a deceased voter.
  
   
• One was apparently making up driver’s license numbers for an unknown number of voters.
  
   
• One submitted about a half-dozen applications for already-registered voters.

Waffleman

For every person actually caught with fraudulent voter registration cards, there are likely many more that fly under the radar, stuffing our voting rolls with fraudulent names.  Once those names are on the rolls, they are extremely difficult to extricate – meaning anyone can go vote under those names, without ever having to prove who they are.
 

GAB Fest

Thursday the six retired judges who make up the Government Accountability Board will hear testimony from nationally recognized legal experts making a strong case against the constitutionality of proposed rules to gag free political speech in Wisconsin.

The judges will also hear completely irrelevant and emotionally charged testimony from Wisconsin’s favorite good government hypocrite Mike McCabe, who runs the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, a non-profit organization which uses every issue known to man to justify gagging free political speech. McCabe will serenade board members with his usual liberal tirade - providing them with a much needed break from the legal realities standing between their desire to make life easier for Wisconsin incumbent politicians, and our right to speak freely about their voting records.

 

Wisconsin Club for Growth is proud to be part of a diverse coalition of business and professional associations, labor unions and other non-profit and membership organizations opposing the proposed ban on free speech, and we are most grateful to representatives from the Center for Competitive Politics and the James Madison Center for Free Speech for providing their testimony to the GAB this week.
 

But don’t hold your breath waiting for Democrats  like Sheldon Wasserman to support a photo identification voting requirement.  Wasserman, who is currently running to unseat  incumbent Republican Senator Alberta Darling, was recently interviewed about the issue of photo identification, and brushed off the fraudulent efforts of group like ACORN:
 

"If there's gonna be fraud there's gonna be fraud.  There's fraud in everything.," Wasserman told WISN in Milwaukee

 

In fact, Sheldon Wasserman knows all about fraud.
  
 

• In 1996,  Wasserman distributed campaign literature claiming he had been named the "legislator of the year" by the Wisconsin Association of School Boards (WASB). The problem is that WASB never named Wasserman legislator of the year.  In fact, the group said they hadn’t designated a legislator of the year in a couple of decades.   (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 10/11/96)
  
   
•  In April of this year, Democrat campaign literature designed to promote Wasserman’s candidacy fraudulently said Alberta Darling was ill and unable to campaign door to door. 
  
   
• Also in April of this year, following the controversy surrounding the false claims about Darling’s health, Wasserman fraudulently told WTMJ Television that he had introduced anti-bullying legislation that could pass early next year.  In fact Wasserman  never signed on to or worked to pass anti bullying legislation which was introduced by Senator Darling and Wasserman’s colleagues in the State Assembly. Wasserman’s official legislative website makes no mention of  legislation regarding school bullying policy.
  
   
• Finally, Wasserman, who refuses to include his party affiliation on his campaign literature, fraudulently told a voter that he was a libertarian.  Although one can’t blame him – with a left-wing voting record like Wasserman’s, anyone would be embarrassed to admit they were a Democrat.