"Get The Job Done Or Go Home!"

Doris "Granny D" Haddock was tiny by any measure of physical stature but a giant in civic terms. Her passing at the age of 100 has made international news, I suppose mostly because of the amazing story of her walk across America a decade or so ago. But Granny was so much more than the sum total of that remarkable trek. She was a great many things, foremost among them an unforgettably powerful example of the difference one person can make.

Granny made at least four trips to Wisconsin that I know of after her legendary journey across the country, to give speeches and network and campaign. In between her visits, I would get an occasional e-mail from Doris and an even more occasional phone call, although her faithful assistant Ruth was in much more regular contact. Considering how well Granny D was known and how much in demand she was across the nation and indeed throughout the world, especially after a movie about her life reached an international audience, my mind always reeled at the thought of how many reform advocates like me she must have been keeping in touch with in places scattered across the globe. Her boundless energy in her 10th decade of life was both inspiring and humbling, to say the least.

Most every time I talked to Doris she apologized to me about something, usually her inability to plan too far into the future or commit too far in advance to participate in this event or that. More than once she joked that "at my age, I don't even buy green bananas at the grocery store."

One thing she never apologized for was her contempt for corrupt politicians and the wealthy interests that own them. She could never be accused of failing to speak her mind. She had lived too long to bite her tongue. Her words had a bite to them, though. I'll never forget back in 2006 when she came and spoke at the "public telling" we decided to hold when state lawmakers here were refusing to hold public hearings on proposed reforms. In her signature New Hampshire accent, she said "If you are reformers, get the job done or go home."



Her remarks were ostensibly aimed at Wisconsin legislators, but I couldn't help but take her words to heart too. Granny D lit a fire under people. I felt that flame every time she was near.

The last time I asked Doris to come to Wisconsin was last September. She initially contacted me to say she appreciated the invitation and was excited to make another visit to our state, but called back several weeks later to apologize. She just didn't feel up to making the trip.

It goes without saying that no apology was necessary. We owed her a lot more than she owed us.

Thank you, Granny

I first met Doris Haddock in February 2003, at a forum on campaign finance reform at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. The woman affectionately known as Granny D already was known far and wide by then, having completed her 3,200-mile trek across America to demonstrate her concern for the health of our democracy and dramatize the need for campaign finance reform. I was privileged to be able to see Doris once or twice a year since that first time our paths crossed.

News came this morning of Granny's death at the age of 100. She was . . . no, make that is . . . a true American hero and an endless source of inspiration. I know I join a multitude of admirers in mourning her passing, but also in celebrating a life exceptionally well lived.

I'm glad I met you, Doris.

How To Smear Without Leaving A Smudge

The U.S. Supreme Court's display of judicial activism on steroids in the area of election financing has Americans across the political spectrum united in revulsion. The court's legislating from the bench even is creating nervousness around the water coolers at Fortune Magazine and the Wall Street Journal.

Ordinary citizens are right to be outraged. But it's doubtful the fretting by business-sector types will last. Even though the nation's highest court legislated into existence the right of corporations to spend unlimited amounts of money on elections, don't expect the likes of Wal-Mart or Microsoft or Goldman Sachs to be sponsoring their own campaign ads any time soon. Most will be too afraid of alienating customers to do that.

That doesn't mean mega-corporations won't be dumping huge sums of money into efforts to sway voters and control election outcomes. In fact, one of Washington's lobbying titans (which also happens to among the 10 largest law firms in America and one of the 20 largest in the world) is already busy advising corporate clients on how to sling mud without actually getting their hands dirty.

Look for trade associations and phony front groups to be even more loaded than they've been up to this point.

Unless major improvements are made to state and federal disclosure laws, corporations will be able to take center stage in elections, imposing their will and turning most candidates into mere bystanders. And they'll be able to do it without much of any fear of a public backlash because their money will be laundered to remove any trace of its true origins and the public will be left without a clue about who is really behind the blizzard of advertisements we all will have to endure.

(Image courtesy of Lisa Larson.)

Our Trip From Bedford Falls To Pottersville

Anyone with a little gray hair who has known Wisconsin for a lifetime can't help but feel that we're being taken on some Clarence Oddbody alternate reality tour. This can't be Wisconsin. Must have gotten some bad liquor.

That feeling swept over me again yesterday when we issued a report showing donations from so-called "payday lenders" to four campaign fundraising committees controlled by legislative leaders. It was hard not to notice both the size and timing of the donations. Three-quarters of the money given to the Assembly Democratic Campaign Committee, for example, was delivered either the day before or a few weeks after Assembly Speaker Mike Sheridan announced he no longer thought it was a good idea to limit the interest rates on cash advances and other forms of payday loans. A 36% rate cap goes "too far," the speaker informed us.

This in a state that for years and years had usury laws that limited the interest any financial institution could charge to 18%. In 1996 this law was passed by the legislature and signed by the governor repealing the limit. Not coincidentally, the number of payday lending establishments has skyrocketed, growing from just a handful in 1996 to well over 500 today. Not coincidentally, these outfits now charge interest rates routinely exceeding 500%.

Wisconsin used to have meaningful consumer protections and a vibrant financial sector with countless locally owned lending institutions. Now we have legalized loan sharking and financial institutions mostly controlled by out-of-state interests.

Get us back, Clarence. Get us back.

Speaking For The Masses

When hundreds of us marched yesterday to protest the U.S. Supreme Court's assault on our democracy with its ruling on election financing in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, we were giving voice to anger and frustration that is felt by an overwhelming majority of Americans. A new Washington Post-ABC News poll shows that opposition to the court's decision runs very deep and is very broad, cutting sharply across party lines.

Two other polls we mentioned in one of our recent E-Lerts showed the same thing.

Shame On U

The Wisconsin Idea sure has fallen on hard times. Long forgotten is how intertwined this signature principle of our great state university system was with the Progressive movement. The UW Extension, one of the earliest manifestations of the Wisconsin Idea and one of the chief ways the university was extended to the boundaries of the state, is itself a Progressive Era reform.

Oh, how the UW has strayed from its roots. Today it is as owned as our politicians.

Nowhere is that more apparent than with those who teach about government. Wisconsin used to be known from coast to coast for clean, open and honest government. We can no longer lay claim to such a reputation, at least not with a straight face. But instead of challenging the status quo and engineering new reforms and working with public officials to make those reforms a reality, most of the political scientists on campus are missing in action. Some of the most prominent among them are apologists for the way things are and throw their weight around on behalf of the very forces that have corrupted our politics and sullied Wisconsin's once-proud reputation.

Professor Ken Goldstein, for example, is fond of calling negative political TV ads a "multivitamin for democracy." Then just recently he sold the UW's soul, climbing in bed with a corporate-funded rightwing think tank and even cooking how polling numbers were reported at the group's request.

Today Professor John Coleman was in the newspaper arguing against a campaign finance disclosure bill that was recently passed by the state Senate, claiming that "more spending and more communication produce better informed voters." Never mind that all the spending addressed by the legislation is done by an incredibly small number of extremely wealthy interest groups. And never mind that the source of money used to pay for the spending is kept a secret, leaving voters entirely in the dark about who is really behind all those multivitamins, er. . . ads. Yep, sounds like a recipe for happy, well-informed voters to Dr. Coleman.

There was a time when real giants at the University of Wisconsin played a major role in making Wisconsin a beacon of honorable politics and good government. The reforms they thought up lasted for the better part of a century. Unfortunately for us, their place has been taken by far smaller figures who at best look the other way at the corruption of our times and at worst are tools used to dismantle the inspired work of their predecessors.

Supremes Doing The 'Twist And Shape'

In 1819 Thomas Jefferson wrote: "The Constitution . . . is a mere thing of wax in the hands of the judiciary which they may twist and shape into any form they please."

Seems what Jefferson meant as a warning to America, the current majority on the U.S. Supreme Court took as a job description.

Adding Journalistic Injury To Judicial Insult

In yesterday's post, I said first impressions of Supreme Court rulings often create false impressions. A commentary by a nationally syndicated Chicago Tribune columnist is a good example. It spreads two misconceptions. First, that Thursday's decision somehow grants corporations a long-denied ability to speak. And second, that many if not most corporations will not exercise this supposed newfound freedom for fear of alienating customers.

The first misconception shows a profound lack of understanding of both the decision in Citizens United v. FEC as well as practical reality. You need look no further than the national health care debate or recent Wisconsin Supreme Court elections to see how ridiculous it is to suggest that corporations have not had a voice in national or state political affairs. What the court did is give corporations an even louder and more dominant voice. That five out of nine members of our nation's highest court concluded that corporations were not being adequately heard in the marketplace of ideas in this country is truly jawdropping.

The second misconception is based on a terribly naive notion of how corporations will react to the Citizens United decision. It is highly doubtful that the likes of Goldman Sachs or WalMart or Microsoft will sponsor their own campaign ads. But that doesn't mean they will sit on the sidelines. They will send their money to associations like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which will do the electioneering for them. Currently, neither federal nor state disclosure laws are sufficient to allow voters to know which corporations will be bankrollling all the election ads. Unless changes are made to those disclosure laws, companies need not worry about angering their customers or even their shareholders.

As I continue to reflect on what will rank right there with the Dred Scott decision as one of the darkest moments in the history of the U.S. Supreme Court, I can't help but wonder if all this is giving any pause to fans of appointed judges who would like to do away with state judicial elections. It will be hard for them to look honestly at this current court and not see how blatantly political it is and how the Citizens United decision was the handiwork of hard-line ideologues who are so obviously tools of wealthy special interests.

Not that we learned anything new Thursday about Chief Justice John Roberts, for example, but he certainly confirmed suspicions that he is a conniving liar who was willing to bear false witness to Congress to secure an appointment for life. After all, Roberts pledged allegiance in his confirmation hearings to the principle of stare decisis, latin for "stand by the decision," meaning courts are bound by previous decisions and what Roberts himself called "settled" law. It is hard to imagine more well-established precedents or more settled laws than those Roberts and his allies just overturned in Citizens United. By this brazen act of judicial hypocrisy, the chief justice further cemented his growing reputation as one of the most radical activists ever to sit on the high court. What will law professors tell their students? How will they teach stare decisis with a straight face?

Anthony Kennedy showed himself to be intellectually double-jointed. He wrote in Caperton v. Massey that huge sums of money spent in election campaigns can violate the Due Process Clause in the Constitution and deny a fair trial to those who face big campaign spenders in court. Then he turned around in Citizens United and wrote this:

"(W)e now conclude that independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption."

And this:

"The appearance of influence or access, furthermore, will not cause the electorate to lose faith in our democracy."

Kennedy offers no evidence and points to nothing in the case record to support these conclusions. He's just sure.

Next

Read it and weep for American democracy. An unfathomably and unspeakably bad ruling. But the temptation to say "game over" is exactly the wrong reaction to the horrible damage the U.S. Supreme Court has done to our democracy. The game is never over.

There is a large menu of possible courses of action. Public financing of elections. Greater disclosure. Shareholder approval of corporate political spending. A constitutional amendment clarifying that money is not speech and corporations are not people. Boycotts of companies that exploit this brazen act of judicial activism to attempt a hostile takeover of elections.

An important first step is to understand what the Supreme Court did and what it did not do. Whenever a high court ruling comes down, there is a flurry of reaction even before the decision can be digested. First impressions inevitably create some false impressions. This case was no exception.

There were media accounts claiming Wisconsin's century-old law banning corporate contributions was struck down. Not true. The case didn't deal at all with corporate donations, nor did the court's decision. It dealt with corporate election spending. Thursday's ruling may end up inspiring an attempted legal challenge to the law, but for now Wisconsin's law still stands, as does the comparable federal law.

Other stories suggested that the bill the state Senate approved on Tuesday is now dead. Also not true. As we noted in the statement we issued the day of the ruling, a supermajority of justices upheld disclosure of election spending, including any done by corporations. The state legislation we've been working for may need to be changed somewhat, but it certainly can move forward. There are even ways it may be able to be strengthened.

Publicly financed elections remain constitutionally sound. Nothing the Supreme Court had to say Thursday has any effect on public financing programs in general or Wisconsin's new Impartial Justice Act specifically. A perfectly appropriate response to the outrageous ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission would be prompt and aggressive action by both Congress and the Wisconsin Legislature on further public financing legislation.

And then there's this heads-up to state lawmakers from Justice John Paul Stevens in his dissenting opinion: "Legislatures remain free...to condition the types of activity in which corporations may engage, including electioneering activity, on specific disclosure requirements or on prior express approval by shareholders or members."

Let the counteroffensive begin.

Same Song, Different Vocalist

On Thursday the Wisconsin Supreme Court is again going to consider whether to finalize new rules allowing judges to rule on cases involving their biggest campaign supporters. Last fall, four of the court's seven members approved recusal rules written by Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce and the Wisconsin Realtors Association. About six weeks later Justice David Prosser withdrew his support, causing the new rules to be temporarily suspended.

Prosser said at the time he still supported the thrust of the rules but believed the language needed some revision. I said at the time that it looked like he was trying to figure out a way to remove the lobbying groups' fingerprints and make it look like the court did its own writing.

Justice Prosser has now submitted his proposed changes. There is no practical difference between Prosser's rules and those written by WMC and the Realtors. Both clearly allow all state judges to rule on cases even when their biggest campaign supporters are involved.

Not only is what the court majority appears poised to do Thursday wrong on its face, but it also runs contrary to a recent decision by the U.S. Supreme Court. In that case, the nation's high court ruled that a member of the West Virginia Supreme Court violated the constitutionally protected right to due process and denied one side a fair trial by judging the case despite having received $3 million in campaign support from the other side.

Justice Prosser and his three allies on the court on this issue (Michael Gableman, Annette Ziegler and Patience Roggensack) appear to be fixing to ignore that ruling, ignore due process concerns and cement in place an ethics rule proclaiming that judges are free to rule on disputes no matter how much campaign help one side has given them.

If that happens, it will be a sad, sad day for our state court system and a telling commentary on just how compromised the majority of our state's highest ranking judges really are.

Say It Ain't So, UW

Polling done by the University of Wisconsin's political science department shows statewide opposition to the use of public money to send students to private schools. Right-wing think tank that helped pay for the polling doesn't like results. Asks UW to alter presentation of the data. UW agrees to do it.

Holy crap.

Are Supremes Getting Cold Feet?

Just heard that no decision was issued by the U.S. Supreme Court in the Citizens United case today. There had been intense speculation that the ruling would come down yesterday. Didn't happen. Then a new flurry of media alerts from court watchers warned that today could very well be the day. Wrong again. For that matter, there was similar speculation late last fall that a decision was imminent.

Oral arguments in this case were originally heard last March, with a decision expected by summer. Then in June the court's majority decided to significantly expand the scope of its review, ordering a new round of oral arguments in September on whether precedents established in 1990 and 2003 restricting the use of corporate funds to influence elections should be overturned. Most observers took this as an ominous sign and expected a ruling before Christmas radically altering the political landscape.

All anyone can do is examine tea leaves, but my reading is the longer it takes for a ruling to come, the better. I'm not saying that when the ruling finally comes, it won't be bad. But it might not be as bad as many feared. With each passing day a broad, precedent-reversing decision becomes less likely because the delays hint that the extremists on the court are having a hard time finding a fifth vote to throw past Supreme Court rulings and longstanding federal and state laws on the scrap heap.

When Sandra Day O'Connor was on the high court, she was the fifth vote in a court majority that upheld campaign finance restrictions on more than one occasion. Conventional wisdom holds that when O'Connor retired and was replaced by Samuel Alito, a new majority hostile to campaign finance reform was formed.

The court's indecision on Citizens United makes you wonder if Justice Anthony Kennedy, who routinely was on the opposite side of O'Connor and the rest of the old majority in campaign finance cases, has decided against a wholesale dismantling of court precedents in this area. Or maybe all the commentaries published from coast to coast about how hypocritical it would be for Chief Justice John Roberts to overturn previous rulings willy-nilly after preaching judicial restraint in his confirmation hearings have given Roberts pause.

Whatever is going on, it's been months and the court hasn't been able to make a move on Citizens United. I would love to be a fly on the wall in those chambers.

You'll Have To Do Better Than That, Mark Neumann

Mark Neumann became the first 2010 candidate for governor to respond to public discontent with politics and politicians and put forward some government reform ideas, including a couple of good ones. Namely banning campaign donations from employees of companies bidding for state contracts and not allowing government employees appointed by the governor to engage in any kind of fundraising for the governor. Both should have been done a long time ago.

Others on Neumann's list are not so hot. Such as term limits for state legislators and constitutional officers. This is neither a new idea nor a particularly promising one. Something like 36 states have them for governor and 15 have them for legislators. Enacting term limit laws was all the rage in the early 1990s, but after nearly two decades the experiment has been a distinct disappointment.

In California, some label the state's term limits a failure. The Guvernator himself was once a big fan of term limits but has since changed his mind. Others, like the highly respected Center for Governmental Studies, aren't willing to give up on them but acknowledge that changes in the law need to be made.

Likewise, an analysis by the Public Policy Institute of California notes term limits have had some positive effects, like accelerating female and minority representation, but concludes that the law has not fundamentally changed the type of legislator who comes to Sacramento. "Rather than representing a new breed of 'citizen legislator,' however, new members after term limits behave a great deal like their precursors," the report says. It goes on to say "the Legislature is less likely to alter the Governor's Budget, and its own budget process neither encourages fiscal discipline nor links legislators' requests to overall spending goals. In addition, legislative oversight of the executive branch has declined significantly."

Closer to home, Michigan is another state that jumped on the term limit bandwagon. The law didn't bring the institutional change that was hoped for. A Wayne State University professor who wrote a book on the subject concludes that the main effect of term limits in Michigan was to make the legislative branch weaker and the executive branch stronger. She even places a good share of the blame for the state's budget mess on term limits.

One-time supporters of term limits have grown disillusioned with them in places like Colorado and Arizona too.

Mark Neumann is to be applauded for talking about how to make government more responsive to the average citizen. Hopefully other candidates for governor will follow suit. But Neumann and the others will have to offer up much more meaningful change than term limits if they are to have any hope of winning over a citizenry soured on politics as usual.

Scraping The Bottom Of The Barrel

When Governor Jim Doyle signed the Impartial Justice bill into law on December 1, a Virginia group called the Center for Competitive Politics all but promised to sue to block the law. CCP's president left no doubt his outfit was shopping for a litigant in Wisconsin even before it got the governor's signature.

CCP is indeed behind a lawsuit filed in federal court last Tuesday challenging the constitutionality of Wisconsin's Supreme Court election reform law. But it seems the litigant shopping didn't go all that well. Turns out the only Wisconsinite they could find willing to be the public face of the lawsuit is someone who was for publicly financed Supreme Court elections before he was evidently talked into being against them.

As Wisconsin Public Radio reported last week:

Former candidate sues over public financing law for high court races

Former Supreme Court candidate and Jefferson County Judge Randy Koschnick has filed a lawsuit challenging Wisconsin's new public financing law for Supreme Court races. That's despite comments he made on the campaign trail in support of public financing.

Koschnick did not take public financing in his unsuccessful race for the state Supreme Court. Any money his campaign spent came either from himself or private donors, and not the state.

But at the press conference where Koschnick announced his candidacy back in November of 2008, he was asked directly how he felt about public financing.

Koschnick responded, "I think that's a great idea."

Koschnick went on to say he wasn't rich, and that he hoped to raise enough money from individuals to run a serious campaign. But, he added that he thought public financing would enable legitimate
candidates to run without necessarily having to be independently wealthy and might also reduce the influence of third-party groups who "obviously wield a lot of power and money."

Despite that praise for public financing on the campaign trail, Koschnick is now trying to overturn the entirety of Wisconsin's new public financing law.

As a candidate, Judge Koschnick made a compelling case that public financing of elections enhances free speech by giving more candidates the means to run competitively. In his lawsuit, he now claims public financing of Supreme Court elections "violates the Speech Clause of the First Amendment" by "suppressing the speech of candidates for the Office of Justice."

Care to explain the flip flop, judge?

Your Lawsuit's A Foul One, Right To Life

Most every voter
In the whole state of Wisconsin
Likes Impartial Justice a lot . . .

But Right to Life,
A powerful big old lobbying group,
Does NOT!

Right to Life hates Impartial Justice! The whole darn law!
Now please don't ask why. Who knows what they saw.
It could be their heads aren't screwed on quite right.
It could be, perhaps, that their shorts are too tight.
But I think that the most likely reason . . . ahem,
May be that they want judges to belong just to them.

But whatever the reason,
Their heads or their shorts,
Just days before Christmas, they're hating impartial courts.
Glaring from on high with a sour, Grinchy frown,
Every lawmaker who voted for it had to be wrong.
For they imagine every voter from Peshtigo to Paoli,
Really wants the best court money can buy.

"They might rule based on facts!" they snarl with a sneer.
"The next high court election is 2011! It's practically here!"
Then they growl, with their fingers nervously drumming,
"We MUST find a way to stop Impartial Justice from coming!"

A Warped View From The Bench

On October 28, four members of the Wisconsin Supreme Court approved rules written by Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce and the Wisconsin Realtors Association allowing judges in our state to rule on cases involving their biggest campaign supporters. A little more than a month later, one of the four - Justice Patience Roggensack - wrote a newspaper commentary defending the action.

Judging from reader reaction, it fooled no one.

In a letter to the editor that appeared in the Wisconsin State Journal on December 11, Norm Littlejohn of Madison asks "Is Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Pat Roggensack naive? Or does she think we are?" The rest of his letter makes his answers to those questions very clear.

Peter Beatty of Middleton pointed out in a letter published in today's State Journal that Roggensack overlooks the U.S. Constitution's guarantee of due process and the U.S. Supreme Court's recent ruling in a West Virginia case, Caperton v. Massey, that huge campaign contributions by one side in the case denied the other side a fair trial. Beatty concludes that it is "embarrassing to live in a state in which the highest justices are political hacks of monied interest groups. It makes a mockery of our high court."

This same sentiment was voiced by The Capital Times in an editorial posted last Friday. The newspaper called her attempt to "portray the Oct. 28 action as an embrace of democracy" a "tortured defense of legalized bribery."

The fate of the rules Roggensack so enthusiastically defends is now up in the air. It appears to have dawned on Justice David Prosser that it looks bad for the court to take what WMC and the Realtors wrote and approve it verbatim. So he has withdrawn his support, causing the new rules to be rescinded at least temporarily. Prosser says he still supports the thrust of the rules but believes the language needs to be fine-tuned. It looks like what he's really trying to do is figure out a way to remove the lobbying groups' fingerprints and make it look like the court did its own writing.

Talk about your tortured defenses of legalized bribery.

Been There, Seen That

We could have told Tiger Woods this was coming. Living up to contracts isn't Accenture's strong suit.

Jumpin' Justices

Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce and the Wisconsin Realtors Association said jump and the majority of Wisconsin Supreme Court justices (namely Prosser, Gableman, Ziegler and Roggensack) jumped. WMC and the Realtors said jump again, and the high court held an "open administrative conference" yesterday to ask how high.

Amazing spectacle. The Flexible Four allowed two of the most powerful lobbying groups in Wisconsin to write rules for them allowing judges to rule on cases involving their biggest campaign supporters. Then the groups decide they are not completely happy with what they wrote and want some changes. The new rules promptly are retracted and Justice Prosser says he'll come back with some kind of proposal in about a week.

So we wait. To see how the court will degrade itself next.

Campaign Donations And The Cable Con

Democratic Governor Jim Doyle and 74 legislators who approved a controversial bill in 2007 to deregulate the cable industry have received more than $493,000 in campaign contributions since then from special interests that supported the measure.

The cable deregulation law, which supporters boasted would increase competition and lower customer bills, was the subject of a Legislative Audit Bureau report this week that found basic cable rates rose an average 21 percent over the past two years. Expanded basic rates increased 11.5 percent between July 2007 and July 2009, the audit said.

Business interests, the telephone industry and two unions - the Communications Workers of America and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers - backed the bill led by AT&T. The telephone giant employed 15 lobbyists to push the bill because it wanted to break into the video provider market with offerings like U-Verse faster and cheaper than under the old cable franchising system. The new law set up a state licensing system that no longer required video providers to negotiate cable contracts with individual communities.

Between January 2008 and June 2009 - the first 18 months after the new law was in place - contributions by special interest backers totaled $493,109 to Doyle, 74 legislators who voted for the bill and are still in the legislature and four legislative fundraising committees.

Doyle has gotten $182,671 followed by the four Democratic and Republican legislative campaign committees, which are mega-fundraising committees used by legislative leaders to milk special interests for campaign cash. The committees accepted between $13,000 and $39,000 from cable deregulation supporters.

For additional information about campaign contributions by AT&T and the others while the bill was being developed and debated in the legislature check out this and this about the bill's authors, Republican Representative Phil Montgomery of Ashwaubenon and Democratic Senator Jeff Plale of South Milwaukee, and this about the 23-9 Senate vote in favor of the bill.

Doyle blamed the economy for souring cable competition - though the pay-to-play economy seemed to treat his campaign just fine. And Montgomery, who has received $6,825 from special interest backers since the bill was approved, told the Associated Press that he was disappointed cable rates haven't dropped.

So are we all.

Fix The Blessed Problem - UPDATE

Amended campaign finance reports for two mega-fundraising committees were filed on the Government Accountability Board's electronic filing system shortly after the Democracy Campaign posted a blog Monday saying the original year-end 2008 reports known to be erroneous had been on the GAB site for 10 months.