WI Contributors Giving Big To Shadow Groups

Unregulated electioneering groups that often sponsor negative ads, mailings and auto calls against political candidates received $619,820 from Wisconsin businesses, labor unions and individuals in the first half of 2007, a Democracy Campaign review shows.

These so-called 527 groups are tax-exempt, political nonprofit organizations named for the U.S. Internal Revenue Service code that regulates them. The groups may raise and spend as much as they want on electioneerings activities. Some of the better known 527s are America Coming Together, GOPAC, Club for Growth and the Democratic Governors Association.

WDC's review of fundraising reports filed by the groups shows Wisconsin special interests are dolingout sharply more than in past, comparable periods and much of it is going to Democratic-leaning 527s.

The $619,820 in Wisconsin contributions in the first half of 2007 compares to $291,410 in the first six months of 2005, $282,544 in the first half of 2003 and $345,791 in the first six months of 2001.

Roughly $412,000 in contributions went to Democratic 527s and about $203,000 went to Republican groups.

Six groups got $50,000 or more from Wisconsin contributors. They include the Progressive Majority which accepted $182,425; the Republican Governors Association, $91,000; the Greater Wisconsin Political Fund, $83,000; GOPAC, $71,936; the Laborers Political League Education Fund, $57,458; and the Democratic Governors Association, $50,375.

The top Wisconsin contributor to these groups in the first six months of 2007 was Milwaukee philanthropist Lynde Uihlein, heiress to the Schlitz Brewing and Allen-Bradley fortunes and a long time backer of Democratic and women's causes, who gave $218,000. Uihlein was followed by the Wisconsin Laborers District Council at $50,816 and Johnson Controls at $50,375.

Clean Slate. Fresh Start.

Tomorrow is the first meeting of the new Government Accountability Board. The new board will meet at 10 a.m. in the Legislative Council conference room (Suite 401) at 1 East Main Street in Madison.

And not a moment too soon.

Created by 2007 Wisconsin Act 1 – the Democracy Campaign-backed ethics reform legislation enacted into law during a January special session of the Legislature called by Governor Jim Doyle – the new nonpartisan board replaces the state Elections Board and Ethics Board and will be responsible for overseeing elections, ethics, lobbying and campaign finance in Wisconsin.

The first order of business will be to select a chairperson and attend to staffing and other administrative matters to establish the new politically independent agency. Specifically, the new board has to hire a director and two division administrators. Then, in addition to all of its other duties, the ethics reform law requires the board to review all of the existing internal operating procedures, guidelines, rules, orders and formal opinions issued by the Elections Board and Ethics Board. Within its first 12 months, the Government Accountability Board must review and reaffirm each of these items or they will terminate by law automatically.

That may sound like bureaucratic busywork, but the two boards that are being replaced left some real messes to clean up. None bigger than the Elections Board's disastrous contract with the global outsourcing firm Accenture to create a federally mandated statewide computerized voter registration system. New problems with the project became public this past weekend, which led to renewed calls for forceful action. The Elections Board and its director Kevin Kennedy appear paralyzed, as they have been for months, as if waiting for the Government Accountability Board to take this debacle off their hands.

The new board has its work cut out for it. Here are a few of the things that most need doing:

• Take the bull by the horns on the voter registration project. The Elections Board and Kennedy have been in denial, and this project has become the state government's equivalent of the Iraq War. It's time to face facts, acknowledge mistakes, develop a sensible exit strategy and then execute a plan for cleaning up the mess and getting the work finished.
• Be proactive. Don't just react lamely like your predecessors. Just today we got yet another glimpse of how things have been done in recent years and what the new board should avoid doing. There's a story in today's Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in which Kevin Kennedy is quoted saying he believes campaign finance laws may have been violated. But near the end of the story is this: "The Elections Board is not looking into the matter because it typically acts only if it receives a complaint, Kennedy said." That is so Elections Board. The old board had all the authority it needed to investigate and take enforcement action on its own initiative, but routinely would not lift a finger unless some citizen gathered all the evidence and filed a formal complaint. That's like a police officer witnessing a crime but refusing to do anything unless a bystander investigates the crime scene and swears out an arrest warrant. This is one internal operating procedure the new Government Accountability Board simply must change. If you have reason to believe laws may have been broken, do your job, gather the facts and take appropriate enforcement action if there's fire where you saw smoke.
• Get some fresh blood on the staff of the new agency. In replacing the state Elections Board and Ethics Board, the Government Accountability Board will be merging the staff and functions of the two agencies into one. The new board will only be able to initially hire three people – a legal counsel who will effectively act as director and two division administrators – so for the time being these three positions represent the board's opportunity to change the staff culture.
• Remember that consistent and rigorous law enforcement is the best educational tool. Speaking of changing the culture, the time-honored practice in both the Elections Board and Ethics Board of focusing on "educating" rather than punishing those who cross ethical lines or break election or campaign finance laws should be high on the Government Accountability Board's list of cultural practices that need changing. When wealthy donors were caught exceeding the legal limit for campaign contributions, the Elections Board would go to extreme lengths to avoid punishing the wrongdoing and instead would suggest ways the donor could be made to appear in compliance with the law – such as offering to assign excess donations to a spouse. In so doing, an unmistakable message was sent to big donors: Feel free to ignore these laws, because nothing will happen to you if you do. The result was more donors breaking the law, more flagrantly. If the new board truly wants to educate election participants about the law, swift and sure enforcement with stiff penalties is the only way.

Here's hoping that tomorrow's meeting produces tangible evidence that a new sheriff has truly come to town.

A Tommy In A Coal Mine

Tommy Thompson R.I.P. Lived by the sword and died by the sword.

The weapon to which I refer, of course, is the money that permeates and has taken over modern politics. And no one in this state has ever played the money game better than Tommy. Over a 34-year career in state politics, Tommy raised more campaign money than anyone in Wisconsin history, although Jim Doyle will almost certainly eclipse him eventually.

Yet despite his legendary fundraising prowess, Thompson – like über-insider Scott Walker, who ended his 2006 bid for the Republican nomination for governor before a single vote was cast – is now just another victim of the wealth primary. He didn't have the money to get his message out. Voters never got the chance to decide whether Tommy had a message worth getting out. The money decided for them.

Like Walker, Tommy is the proverbial canary in a coal mine. The fact that the race for president was too rich for Tommy's blood – just as last year's race for governor was too rich for Walker's – warns how toxic all the money in politics has become. If Tommy Thompson and Scott Walker don't have the wherewithal to be financially viable candidates for higher office, now that's saying something.

Which brings me to the final cruel irony that sealed Tommy's fate. He was forsaken by the elite Wisconsin donors who made him a four-term governor here. And he seemed genuinely surprised by that. He shouldn't be. Money flows to power, and now that Tommy is no longer in a position to do big donors in this state any favors, they have no use for him. If ever there were living proof that the incessant claims of the political class that campaign donations are benign is a load of crap, Tommy Thompson is it. His aspirations just died at the hands of this raging malignancy.

What is presumably the final chapter in Tommy's political career is a story of infidelity. He had a solid marriage with Wisconsin voters. But in the end, the mistress he jumped in bed with dumped him for a sexier, more accommodating and more generous lover.

It could be worse for Tommy. Such dalliances led one-time rival Chuck Chvala – who Tommy vanquished with ease in 1994 – to jail. Tommy was just left in the private sector.

Does AT&T Have A Direct Line To God?

A Chicago-based group called the Ministerial Alliance Against the Digital Divide (MAADD) held a press conference yesterday at the Capitol to voice support for the Wisconsin legislation creating statewide cable TV franchising that AT&T is pushing here.

A front group called TV4Us that AT&T finances already has been caught making fraudulent claims of public support for the company's cable legislation (for more on that, read this and this). Now men of the cloth are being enlisted in the battle over cable's future in our state. Clergymen who Capitol-watchers down in Illinois openly suggest are being paid to shill for AT&T (see this and this).

One thing is sure. MAADD claimed yesterday that AT&T's bill would save Wisconsin families over $400,000 a day and cited a study by the Phoenix Center for Advanced Legal and Economic Public Policy Studies as proof. The Phoenix Center's director has admitted receiving financial support from AT&T.

The Not So Invisible Hand

As the phenomenon of businesses writing legislation – like AT&T's cable bill this year or the "Job Creation Act" written by industry lobbyists a few years back – grows more commonplace in the State Capitol, it's worth reflecting on what the father of free-market economics had to say about the practice. His words are right here.

487 Days And Counting

Why have 487 days passed since Scott Jensen was convicted of three felonies and he's still not serving his sentence?

Catering To Delusion

Looks like radio shouter and neocon blogger Charlie Sykes is on to the ultimate Internet hoax – take a well-documented fact you just can't bear and indignantly claim it's nothing but an Internet hoax. Then get some soulmates on the airwaves and in the blogosphere to give your claim the appearance of credence by repeating it over and over again, and you're well on your way to erasing history.

The Democracy Campaign recently quoted Abraham Lincoln in our statement on the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling on Wisconsin Right to Life's legal challenge to the federal McCain-Feingold campaign reform law. Sykes accused us of using a bogus quote, citing snopes.com.

Our source for the Lincoln quote was The Lincoln Encyclopedia by Archer H. Shaw, published by Macmillan in 1950. Page 40. To get the book, go here. Another source is page 954 of Abraham Lincoln: A New Portrait (volume 2) by Emanuel Hertz, published in 1931. Hertz published another pertinent book, The Hidden Lincoln; from the Letters and Papers of William H. Herndon, in 1938.

After hearing that some doubted the authenticity of the quote, University of California-Davis researcher Rick Crawford went digging and was willing to stake his academic reputation on his finding that the quote is authentic. In the course of his research on the subject, Crawford also found this on page 24 of Lincoln's Complete Works (volume 1), published in 1905: "These capitalists generally act harmoniously and in concert to fleece the people, and now that they have got into a quarrel with themselves, we are called upon to appropriate the people's money to settle the quarrel." Lincoln uttered those words in a speech to the Illinois legislature in January 1837.

The likes of Charlie Sykes do not want to believe that the party of Lincoln's namesake may have had such concerns about corporate power. Even if it says so in exhaustively researched, well-documented and peer-reviewed books that have been in publication for more than a half century and have yet to be challenged by serious historians, it can't be true. So Sykes takes snopes.com's word for it. Even if some of the content on that online rumor mill is, well, less than confidence inspiring. Or downright weird.

Sykes has something in common with much of his audience. Those who hang on his every word want to be lied to. They don't want to believe in evolution. They want to believe the earth is really 6,000 years old, despite the preponderance of scientific evidence showing they are a few billion years off. They want to believe global warming is not happening or, if the earth's climate is indeed changing, human behavior has nothing to do with it. They need someone like Charlie Sykes to assure them they're right.

They support U.S. policy in Iraq even though it's easily one of the biggest foreign policy blunders in American history and they think the Geneva Conventions are an intolerable nuisance. They need a Bill O'Reilly to confirm that warped belief, even if twisting history and slandering dead American World War II soldiers is the only way he can think to do it. O'Reilly and Sykes and their ilk cater to an audience that wants reality to disappear when that reality offends them or makes them uncomfortable or just doesn't fit their world view. They need to be told that fantasy is reality.

Charlie Sykes and Bill O'Reilly and dozens of others just like them happily oblige because they make a handsome living indulging their audience's delusions.

Potted Plants? Well...

The chairman of the outgoing State Elections Board has been grousing about the $467 per diem each of the six retired judges on the new Government Accountability Board will get for meetings. The new board, expected to start work this fall, will replace the existing Elections and Ethics boards.

Each of the Elections Board's eight partisan, political appointees is paid $25 per meeting.

John Savage, a Milwaukee attorney and GOP appointee to the board, recently told the Shepherd Express the GAB members don't deserve to be paid that much just because they are judges, and they alread get a state pension.

Referring to the present board, Savage asks, "Are we potted plants?"

Well, if you don't want to know the answer maybe you shouldn't ask the question.

The Elections Board's legacy will be one of helping foster the decrepit political and policymaking environment we have now because it refused to enforce Wisconsin's campaign finance laws and penalties. It helped create an atmosphere in which six former legislative leaders were charged and convicted on a variety of misdemeanor or felony misconduct and other ethics charges. The investigations, charges and convictions were courtesy of outside law enforcement and not the board.

The board's inaction also has emboldened wealthy special interest contributors to make more and bigger campaign contributions, sometimes exceeding the legal limit, and run vicious media campaigns to elect officials who will oblige them and not the public.

The Last Welfare Queens

A two-story series by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel about the state's welfare programs for business echoed findings in a Wisconsin Democracy Campaign report released in March 2005 and an August 2006 state audit.

All three reviews found the state's business welfare programs hand out millions of dollars a year in cheap loans, grants and tax breaks, but don't know if many of the companies are meeting job creation and other economic development goals. In other cases, the state waives some of the goals and requirements when it hands out the money.

The WDC report explored the level of state welfare to businesses that made campaign contributions. Those who made contributions got substantially higher state aid than those who did not.

Three investigations by three different organizations in three different years all find these programs give away millions in state tax dollars to wealthy corporations that kept the cash, but not their promises.

Consistently Inconsistent

On the same day the U.S. Supreme Court issued its ruling putting new limits on enforcement of the federal McCain-Feingold campaign reform law, the court ruled that schools may censor the speech of students, even when the speech occurs off school property.

Writing for the narrow majority of a split U.S. Supreme Court, Chief Justice John Roberts leaned heavily on free speech arguments to carve out an exception to disclosure requirements and restrictions on campaign money. While not striking down McCain-Feingold as unconstitutional, the majority opinion invites special interests to play word games in their advertisements to get around the law.

The court ruled that advertisements targeting candidates for federal office and run in the days before an election may be funded with unlimited corporate or union funds unless the ads are the "functional equivalent of express advocacy" and only if the ads are "susceptible of no reasonable interpretation other than as an appeal to vote for or against a specific candidate."

By shielding ad sponsors from disclosure requirements and campaign contribution limitations if an ad has "content . . . consistent with that of a genuine issue ad" and "lacks indicia of express advocacy," the Court essentially revived the so-called magic words test that it found "functionally meaningless" less than four years ago in McConnell v. FEC. And made the nation's campaign finance laws prone to easy manipulation.

Roberts justified this result by saying the First Amendment "requires us to err on the side of protecting . . . speech rather than suppressing it." His majority opinion goes on to say: "We give the benefit to speech, not censorship."

Roberts saw things differently on the student speech case. Again writing for the majority, Roberts ruled that schools may prohibit student expression that can be interpreted as advocating drug use, even though Roberts acknowledged that the message at issue in the case – a banner saying "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" unfurled by a student outside of school – was "cryptic."

Cryptic? Hell, it was inane . . . even by the student's estimation. But no more inane than most of the campaign ads we are doomed to watch.

The irony is that, contrary to popular mischaracterization, the McCain-Feingold law does not prevent any group from airing a political ad at any time, all the way up to Election Day. It merely prevents groups from using corporate or labor union treasury funds to pay for ads run within 60 days of an election. And groups have to disclose their funding sources to the public. But there is no censorship. Yet disclosure and campaign money restrictions ran afoul of the First Amendment's free speech protections in the collective mind of the Roberts court, while outright censorship of student speech did not.

This may seem wildly inconsistent. But if you look closely at the trends in recent Supreme Court rulings, the powerful are served time and again. Weaker elements of our society are not. When you look at who's winning and who's losing in recent cases, this court is scrupulously consistent.

Couldn't They Just Join Softball Leagues?

James Buchen, vice president of government relations at Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce, was quoted recently defending state lawmakers' habit of campaign fundraising during the state budget process. He said fundraisers help break the tension that builds during a legislative session. Sort of like a spa.

"More than anything it's a social outlet that this process sorely needs," Buchen said.

He went on to say fundraisers are a "setting where you can get to know people." And buy a tax break or two.

No Cable Subscriber Left Behind

If Wisconsin's experience is anything like what is happening in other states, the so-called Video Competition Act being pushed by AT&T and put on a fast track to passage by eager-to-please state lawmakers will end up deserving a place right next to No Child Left Behind and the federal Clear Skies and Healthy Forests initiatives in the Doublespeak Hall of Fame.

Legislative sponsors, AT&T's lobbyists and its PR machine all are chirping about how the legislation will lower cable TV rates in Wisconsin. Sounds a lot like the hype for No Child Left Behind before it became evident how many children are being left behind. For starters, only one in five students eligible for the tutoring the law promised are getting it.

As sure as Clear Skies allowed more air pollution and Healthy Forests gave timber companies the green light to more aggressively harvest trees on public lands, it's a safe bet that cable bills will go up under the Video Competition Act. Just look at Texas, where legislation virtually identical to AT&T's bill in Wisconsin has done the opposite of what was promised.

George Orwell's got to be doing double axels and triple toe loops in his grave.

Lincoln's Warning

On the surface, the commentary of mine that was posted today on our Web site deals with the upcoming U.S. Supreme Court ruling on Wisconsin Right to Life's legal challenge to the federal McCain-Feingold campaign finance law. Just beneath the surface is anxiety about corporate immortality and plutocracy.

The piece quotes Thomas Jefferson warning of the growing threat to the infant republic posed by the "aristocracy of our monied corporations." The better part of a century later, President Abraham Lincoln echoed Jefferson's fear.

In a November 21, 1864 letter to Colonel William F. Elkins, Lincoln wrote: "I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. . . . corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed."

The warnings of both Jefferson and Lincoln ring truer than ever today.

A Queen Bee In A Dying Hive

Most mainstream news coverage of election campaigns is based on the widely accepted assumption that business and labor are political equals. They are not in the same league. Not even close.

A recently released Democracy Campaign study shows that over the last 12 years business interests have made $12 in campaign contributions for every $1 labor unions have given to candidates for state office in Wisconsin.

The old political orthodoxy that business bankrolls Republicans while unions fund the Democrats is a myth. Corporate interests are indeed the GOP’s major benefactors, but the Democrats have changed teams. They get five times more campaign money from business than labor is giving them.

If you wonder why Jim Doyle agreed to a business tax break – so-called single factor taxation – that even Tommy Thompson wouldn’t support, or if you wonder why Joe Wineke works as a lobbyist for AT&T when he’s not tending to his duties as chair of the state Democratic Party, all you have to do is follow the money.

And it’s not just campaign donations to candidates where the rise of corporate influence within the Democratic Party is plainly visible. The Democrats’ leading “issue advocacy” group in Wisconsin is being sustained by a feeding tube through which major corporate donations flow.

The bottom line is that the labor unions are getting their heads handed to them. Corporate interests have a firm financial grip on both major parties. Labor is losing political clout by the day.

So why is organized labor reticent at best and at times even openly hostile toward campaign finance reform? Since unions have people and corporations have capital, why does organized labor seem content competing on a money playing field . . . even when they are so hopelessly outgunned? Why do they actively and sometimes even openly work to thwart efforts to change that playing field?

The head of the biggest of the big labor players – Wisconsin Education Association Council – recently told the lobbying trade publication Capitol Report Wisconsin that “WEAC has never lobbied to kill campaign finance reform.”

It’s true that WEAC usually takes great care to disclose nothing about its position on campaign reform legislation, registering neither in favor of nor in opposition to reform bills, so as to maintain plausible deniability about their efforts to undermine reform efforts.

But I personally saw a WEAC lawyer appear numerous times before the state Elections Board in opposition to full disclosure and regulation of so-called “issue ads” – campaign advertisements masquerading as issue advocacy that plainly support the election or defeat of a candidate. In other words, WEAC was lobbying to keep a loophole open that is allowing millions of dollars in corporate donations to flow into Wisconsin election campaigns.

If you won’t take my word for it, clear evidence of WEAC’s lobbying against this campaign reform can be found on page one of the official minutes of the state Elections Board’s September 1, 2004 meeting and also on page three of the minutes of the board’s March 10, 2004 meeting. This is rare documentation of WEAC’s activities in opposition to campaign finance reform. Like I said, most times the teachers union has carefully maintained plausible deniability.

Why is WEAC working to keep open a loophole that its presumed nemesis, Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce, is exploiting to buy elections? An especially good question considering that WEAC has rarely if ever taken advantage of this loophole, preferring instead to fund its campaign ads with regulated PAC funds.

One is tempted to conclude that unions like WEAC and organized labor generally are dumb as shovels. At the risk of giving an undeserved benefit of the doubt, I don’t think stupidity is the answer, or even lack of imagination. I suspect it’s that most of the unions would rather be a queen bee in a dying hive than a drone in a thriving one.

When unions were in their heyday, Democrats controlled government and organized labor controlled the Democrats. Today, if not for the Iraq War, Republicans would be the clear majority party in America. Before public opinion about the war started turning sour, the Republicans controlled the White House and both houses of Congress, not to mention most statehouses. Not only has labor’s party been largely out of power, it’s not even labor’s party anymore. Even in a comparatively strong union state like Wisconsin, Democrats are getting five times more campaign money from business than from labor.

So the unions’ money is only enough for them to retain a controlling stake in an ever-shrinking contingent of a minority political coalition. And they lose on issue after issue.

Despite declining membership and waning influence, labor’s aging leadership clings to old practices that put the working class at a profound disadvantage in the modern public arena. Whether it’s done out of stupidity, or lack of imagination, or out of a misguided belief that it’s better to wholly own a few powerless politicians than be one of many stakeholders in a thriving political enterprise, it can’t get much worse for working people.

Listen To Your Elders

Two of Wisconsin's elder statesmen – former Governor Lee Sherman Dreyfus and former legislator and state school superintendent Bert Grover – sounded off recently about the nature of modern politics and the state of our democracy. One a Republican, the other a Democrat. Both worth listening to. To read Grover's piece, go here. The Dreyfus commentary is here.

Shadowy Is As Shadowy Does

Democratic campaign operative Bill Christofferson took exception recently to a commentary of mine that referred to his Greater Wisconsin Committee as a "shadowy outfit."

In his letter to the editor, Christofferson claims the Greater Wisconsin Committee "operates exactly the same way" as the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign. GWC is an electioneering group. It is a receptacle for special interest donations that cannot be legally given directly to candidates, and it uses that extralegal money to pay for campaign ads that plainly aim to influence the outcome of elections. The Democracy Campaign is a watchdog group and does no election campaign advertising whatsoever. Equating these two nonprofit groups is like saying night and day operate exactly the same way.

Christofferson goes on to say I imply Greater Wisconsin Committee is spending corporate money but have no way of knowing. He says "given the progressive, pro-consumer positions Greater Wisconsin takes, corporate dollars are not likely to flow its way."

Internal Revenue Service records show that one of GWC's biggest sources of funds is the Democratic Governors Association, a nonprofit corporation. In 2005 and 2006, the DGA gave Christofferson's group nearly $1.1 million. Where did DGA get the money it then funneled to outfits like Greater Wisconsin Committee? Wisconsin donors included Johnson Bank, Johnson Controls, Madison Gas & Electric, Miller Brewing, Northwestern Mutual Life, S.C Johnson and Son, Thrivent Financial for Lutherans, Wisconsin Public Service Corporation and three Indian tribes. And, oh yes, indicted casino developer Dennis Troha, who appears to have figured out a little too late that he could make use of groups like DGA and GWC to get around legal limits on campaign donations.

The list of out-of-state donors to Greater Wisconsin Committee's sugar daddy reads like a who's who of corporate America – AT&T, Coca Cola, Goodrich Tires, Lockheed Martin, Motorola, Toyota, Union Pacific and Verizon Communications, just to name a few.

Documents filed with the IRS also show that another national nonprofit corporation, the Democratic Attorneys General Association, supplied Greater Wisconsin Committee with over $800,000 in 2006. Among the Wisconsin donors who filled the DAGA's coffers were Miller Brewing and Wisconsin Energy Corporation. National contributors included Altria Group (formerly Philip Morris), AT&T, Dow Chemical, GlaxoSmithKline and Hewlett Packard.

Squeezing Georgia Thompson

If you've been following the state travel contract saga, or if you're just interested in peering through a window into our criminal justice system, this is must reading. And damn good journalism.

Sweet Deal Turns Sour

News that a top executive with a Chicago-based real estate company was charged yesterday in federal court with soliciting a kickback on the sale of a state building had a ring of familiarity to it.

Just over a year ago, the Democracy Campaign pointed out large contributions from Equis Corporation executives to Governor Jim Doyle's reelection campaign right around the time the company landed an eyebrow-raising contract to sell state property. That prompted media scrutiny of the terms of the deal.

It looked like a sweetheart deal then, and it certainly doesn't look any better now.

Senate Passes 3 Reform Bills

The state Senate this afternoon passed three reform proposals supported by the Democracy Campaign including Senate Bill 77, truth-in-campaigning legislation requiring full disclosure of special interest electioneering. SB 77 was approved on a 26-7 vote.

The Senate also passed Senate Bill 23, which addresses the revolving door between lawmaking and lobbying by requiring a one-year cooling off period before state lawmakers who leave the Legislature may start working as lobbyists at the Capitol. SB 23 passed on a 30-3 vote.

A third WDC-backed bill, Senate Bill 170, known as the Judicial Right to Know bill, was passed this afternoon on a 19-14 vote.

Your Party. Delivered.

So the head of the state Democratic Party is a lobbyist for AT&T. Talk about your metaphors.

The news that Joe Wineke has joined the telecommunication giant's stable of hired guns evokes memories of the reaction to a shameful and scandalous episode in another time and place. As they said then, "say it ain't so, Joe."