CFG Victory for Free Speech
 Yesterday the Wisconsin Club for Growth won a huge victory for free and open political speech. A panel of retired judges agreed not to enforce their new rule prohibiting groups like ours from conducting issue advocacy which mentions the name of a candidate on the September or November ballot within 30 or 60 days of the election.
On August 2, 2010, the Wisconsin Club for Growth and the liberal One Wisconsin filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court Western District of Wisconsin, seeking a declaratory judgment and preliminary injunctive relief from Wisconsin Government Accountability Board (GAB) rule 1.28.
The stipulation means that the Government Accountability Board does not have the ability to regulate issue advocacy communications under Wisconsin's campaign finance laws.
Club for Growth Board member Eric O’Keefe said, “Individuals and organizations need to be free to comment on public policy and the records of public officials, regardless of the time of year. That is not just our long-held position; it is the U.S. Supreme Court's long-held position, applying the First Amendment.”
The state finally has recognized its own limitations in regulating any speech that is not express advocacy or its functional equivalent. A federal judge today delayed approving the deal that prevents the GAB from enforcing rules regulating issue advocacy, but the GAB has agreed not to enforce the rule pending further action by the court.
Additional lawsuits have been filed in federal and state court challenging other aspects of the GAB’s new rule, but the agreement will allow Club for Growth and hundreds of groups like ours to continue with our activities, as we always have, without registering and reporting with the state.
Train Crazed
 It makes no difference whether you’re buying insurance, real estate, or a used car: When the offer requires that you “buy now” and don’t take time to ask questions, you’d better walk away because the seller is hiding things.
So it is with commuter rail. The deeper state and local governments march into this swamp, the harder they stonewall the public’s attempt to learn what’s happening or to weigh in on the issue.
At the end of July, Dane County Clerk Bob Ohlsen reacted to a call for a commuter rail referendum by saying it would be a “huge waste” of money. We’re unsure whether Ohlsen is guilty of spectacular incompetence or brazen contempt, but his excuse for opposing a referendum was that he wouldn’t have time to prepare divided ballots for communities that are partly in and partly outside a new transit authority taxing district.
Meanwhile, city officials reacted badly to Republican congressional Candidate Peter Theron proposing a simple exercise to see how traffic would be affected by trains running through the Madison isthmus.
Theron called for a simulation with crossing guards halting traffic for one minute, 13 times an hour between 4 and 6 p.m. on August 27th. The simulation would occur on a Friday afternoon, with much of the downtown government workforce had already gone for the weekend.
Nevertheless, the Wisconsin State Journal reported that “city officials are skeptical about whether the experiment will do anything more than inconvenience drivers.” Of course trains wouldn’t do that. Anyone beyond age six can see the real inconvenience would be for the charlatans promoting this taxpayer ripoff.
One Issue Says It All
 Last week, at about the same time we were lamenting the ongoing conversion of Lake Michigan into a giant sewage pond, WTMJ’s Charlie Sykes posed the question whether this ought to be an issue in the gubernatorial campaign between Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett and his Republican opponent. Our answer: Not only should it be an issue, it would do just fine by itself even if there weren’t any others.
Six years ago, Tom Barrett won office in part by blaming his predecessor for a sewage spill the equivalent of spitting in the ocean, compared with what’s happened on Barrett’s watch. He hammered Mayor Marvin Pratt for doing nothing over the course of 60 whole days to clean up MMSD’s act. Now, after six years of Barrett, the only thing that’s changed is the spills are—literally—23,000 times bigger.
Sykes has performed a genuine service by repeatedly playing a 2004 Barrett radio ad ripping Pratt for failing to address MMSD’s problems and spelling out an aggressive plan to fix them if elected mayor.
As mayor, Barrett’s given himself 36 times longer than he gave Marvin Pratt to straighten things out. It’s obvious his talk back in 2004 had precisely the same value as the stuff his sewerage district is now pumping into the lake.
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