*Sniff, Sniff*. Do You Smell Smoke?

The other day, we pointed the gentle reader to Illy-T's* play by play as Patrick McIlheran gets victimized in a flame war with the second in command of the news room, George Stanley.  The flaming of McIlheran was about a German study claiming that BPA was safe.

Looks like the ensuing lull was not a cease fire, but merely Stanley loading up the big flamethrower:

Four authors of a new report concluding that bisphenol A is safe have ties to companies and groups that benefit from the controversial chemical.

The report was written by the Advisory Committee to the German Society for Toxicology, the country's national association of toxicologists.

Poor Paddy won't be able to sit for a week the way his ass is getting burned.

*Illy-T's coverage was so masterful, even the real media noticed it.

It's Hard To Be A Conservative: Part One Gazillion

Pity poor Charlie Sykes and company.

They are expending considerable amounts of time and energy and selective outrage day in and day out to convince people that it is an outrage to spend a couple of millions of dollars to ensure the integrity of the voting process.

At the same time, Sykes and friends will have to explain why it's a good idea to spend even more than the recount to ensure that whole sections of the populace have their voting rights impeded and to ensure the loss of integrity of the voting process.

It truly is a wonder how they can still look at themselves in the mirror.

McIlheran's Pants Are On Fire

No, not in the PolitiFact sense of the term. That's left for Charlie Sykes.

McIlhernan's burning sensation is the one that comes from having a senior editor of your newspaper publicly slap you down.

The source of this and some other fun observations would be the Illusory One.

Mayday! Solidarity March

The Biggest Shtick In The State

Monday morning, Charlie Sykes spent part of his squawk show trying to take credit for the Prosser "mandate" of a victory. (Note to Charlie: 0.49% is far from a mandate. It's more like a mistake.)

Illy-T does the yeoman's work of breaking down just what influence Sykes might have had on the race:

What is sad, though, is Sykes's mincing triumphalism, because what he doesn't tell you is that if his special theory has validity, then the dissembling shouter managed to impede Justice Prosser's progress in almost every single one of the Wisconsin counties he mentions, by:

Milwaukee: 11 points
Racine: 6 points
Waukesha: 8 points
Washington: 5 points
Ozaukee: 9 points
Dodge: 11 points
Fond Du Lac: 11 points
Jefferson: 10 points
Walworth: 4 points

That's how much Prosser conceded, between the general election on April 5 and the primary election on February 15, which is when Sykes commenced his 50K-watt campaign of ludicrous propagandas

Can you imagine that? If the election was even just a week longer, Sykes might have managed to give the race to JoAnne Kloppenburg.

Sykes' delusions of grandeur isn't anything new though.  When she was still an overt political player, Jessica McBride had the same syndrome.

Vicki McThugga

Vicki McKenna loves to attack working men and women by referring to anyone who stands up for democracy or for basic rights as "union thugs."  It has become the favorite bogeyman of the right wing squawking class.

Of course, the rest of us know that there is not one grain of truth in it, since tens of thousands of people can show up to make their voices heard and not one person gets arrested.

However, the same can't be said for squawk radio hosts.  For example, there is the infamous ticket given to Charlie "Light my fuse" Sykes.  But it turns out, he's not the only scofflaw on the Wisconsin airwaves.

There is also Vicki Pyzysnki, or as you may know her, Vicki McKenna.  It appears that Ms. McKenna was arrested and charged with two counts of disorderly conduct for being "verbally and physically combative" at a Badgers game at Camp Randall.  Reports indicate that she also resisted arrest. Yes, alcohol was involved.

The charges were eventually dropped due to deferred prosecution.

Perhaps the most interesting thing though is this part of the story of her arrest:

The booking record noted her tattoos: ``Wolf on back, snake on chest.''

Source of picture: Sly

Just What Did Happen To The Republicans? (NSFW)

Charlie's Double Standard On Double Standards

Last week, Charlie Sykes made a brash statement trying to play up the controversial election for the Supreme Court.  He claimed that:

"They put in as much money as they will ever be able to. They will never again, in Wisconsin, be able to mobilize a 3-to-1 money advantage."

On Sunday, PolitiFact decided to take a look at those claims. Unsurprisingly, they found him to be a flat out liar* and gave him the woeful "Pants on Fire" rating, his second one.**

Needless to say, the sniveling Sykes got his undies in a bundle about being burned again. He's been ranting for two days now, including attacking the PolitiFact reporters not just once, but twice.

In the first launch, aided by his fellow Bradley Foundation beneficiary, Christian "Atomic Pantload" Schneider, is all in a tither that PolitiFact didn't offer enough proof.  They do this in spite of the fact that while PolitiFact actually cites their sources, Sykes' source was an "unidentified 'political observer'" who Sykes also identified as being pro-Prosser.  When given a chance to be clearer on his source(s) of information, Sykes refused to respond.

In his second attack, Sykes then pulled the classic conservative ploy of moving the goal posts. Instead of whining about the sources of information, since the reporters had many and Sykes none, he chooses instead to attack on a whole different subject.  Instead of talking about Sykes' provably-false statement, Sykes chose to whine and tantrum about whether they ever look at other talk show hosts.  Apparently, Sykes is an adherent to the phrase "if you can't dazzle them with brilliance, then baffle them with bullshit."

What it boils down to his Sykes got caught with his burning pants down around his ankles. When he was asked to support his BS claims, he should have just told the truth like he did the first time:

"My evidence? ....absolutely none"

*He was also lying about the supposed imminent end to the unions.

**It amazes me that even though his pants have been on fire twice now, none of the crap he puts in his hair has caught flame.

Sykes' Cognitive Dissonance

It's got to be hard to be Charlie Sykes.

All this week, he's been trying to argue that JoAnne Kloppenburg would be a bad Supreme Court Justice because as a prosecutor, she has been doing her job and enforcing the laws as they are written, working equally well for both Republican and Democratic Attorney Generals.  Then he would turn around, sometimes in the same breath, argue that she would be a bad Supreme Court Justice because she would be some sort of activist judge that would not follow any laws.

McIlheran: In Defense Of Witch Hunts

Professor William Cronon is a history professor at the University of Wisconsin - Madison.  He is also a blogger who wrote an eye-opening piece on how the Koch Brothers and their ilk are funding and controlling this recent assault that we have seen in recent weeks, not only on the working people of Wisconsin, but all across the country.

Within days, the Wisconsin GOP came down like a gang of locust, making a very specific open records request.  It was obvious by their choice of words to search for that their only concern was to throw a wide fishing net in their expedition in hope of finding some stray tidbit that they could conflate and use in an effort to discredit his good name.

Patrick McIlheran, resident GOP spokesman at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (motto: Have you unsubscribed yet?) tries a pathetic attempt to justify the GOP's witch hunt (emphasis mine):

Schneider points out something else: The left has freaked, loudly enough to shake some conservatives, because the Wisconsin Republican Party ran a freedom of information request on Cronon's UW e-mail account. Was the professor using the equipment provided by taxpayers to play politics? Inquiring minds are curious, but the left behaves as if to request the records was itself some kind of suppression of the professor's free thought.

The question for McIlheran is this: On what grounds do you suspect that Professor Cronon was using the government's computer to write his blog?

Having some experience myself with what Cronon is currently going through, I have to wonder.

Is it based on some baseless and artificially created "proof" as the right is wont to rely on, since the truth and reality rarely supports their positions?

Or is it because they so often don't do the ethical thing that they naturally presume no one else does either?

Or is Charlie Sykes their director of research?

As McIlerhan would say: Inquiring minds are curious...

Reading Between The Tweets

It appears that there is some love lost in Wingnut Land:

Most people read that as that Charlie Sykes thinks Jeff Stone is dead in the water.  And that's a likely scenario. Stone did himself no great favors by aligning himself hip-to-hip with Scott Walker.  Walker did lose Milwaukee County in November on a 68-32 margin, and that's when Walker had popularity. Stone then continued to bury himself by playing along with Walker's attack on the working people of this state and introducing a bill to keep poor people, minorities and college students from voting.

That's not exactly the prescribed formula on how to win friends and influence people.

But there also may be another explanation for Sykes' tweet.

He could be pining away for his friend, who would rather hang around with ex-cons than with Sykes.  Can't say that I blame Stone for that one either.

Prosser's Problem Identified

On Friday, there was a debate between David Prosser and JoAnne Kloppenburg, the two candidates for the Wisconsin Supreme Court.  Prosser attacked his opponent by trying to label her with vague titles and offering no reasoning for his name-calling (emphasis mine):

Justice David Prosser went on the attack in a debate Friday, calling his campaign opponent an ideologue trying to mask her true sentiments. 

Assistant Attorney General JoAnne Kloppenburg said Prosser was mischaracterizing her and she had never allowed personal views to color her approach to cases in two decades at the Department of Justice. 

Prosser said Kloppenburg held "extreme political and social views" but did not specify what they were. 

"She's trying to camouflage her views and not level with the people of Wisconsin," Prosser said. 

"She is an unbending ideologue. And I wouldn't say that if I hadn't heard that multiple times."

Now, let's first see if his accusations are accurate.  Here is Kloppenburg's campaign commercial:



Doesn't seem so extreme to me. If anything, she could be described as rather centrist.

So why would make these wild and baseless accusations? Besides the fact that he is probably not polling very well right now, thanks to his close association with Scott Walker, that is.

Prosser gives us the answer in the part cited above.  It's obvious he listens to too much talk radio and is no longer able to be objective or honest.  Not a good thing for a Supreme Court Justice candidate to have problems with.

That alone should show why Kloppenburg is the much better choice.

They're So Cute When They're All Petulant

Over the past few years a certain subset of bloggers has made the case that money is speech, that there should be no limits on how money is spent to influence politics. The most egregious example of this is the Citizens United decision.

But, now that real people are using their own money to influence politics in the only way they can compete those very same bloggers are shocked, shocked to find out that money is a sword that cuts both ways.

Here is the legacy of Jim Haney at WMC; he sowed the seeds for a business climate in Wisconsin that pitted employers against workers. Now Kwik Trip, Johnsonville and Sargento are reaping the fruit of those vines and the perpetually aggrieved are squealing about it.

Here's a piece of advice for the next time AFP buys a political movement; you might consider the consequences of naming it after the best known boycott in American history. The real patriots of the real Boston Tea Party knew that consumers have choices that can change the system. Thanks to the Koch brothers and Jim Haney Wisconsin companies will have to deal with the fallout from that.

Frontiers of free enterprise

This item will no doubt get the same prominent display in the print edition as the recent story about the salaries of national union leaders:

Steven J. Smith, the chairman, chief executive and president of Journal Communications Inc., received total compensation of more than $2 million last year, according to a regulatory document filed Thursday.

The Message Isn't The Problem

For the past week or so, Charlie Sykes and some of his trained parrots have been going on about how Scott Walker and the Republicans are doing such a wonderful thing by stripping people of their rights.

Sykes also said that Walker's biggest problem is that he just isn't "messaging" very well and people just don't recognize that their impending fiscal doom is going to be the best thing that happened to them.

But Walker's problem isn't the message he's trying to feed us.

Walker's problem is that there just simply isn't enough lipstick for that pig.  And now that he has awoken and revitalized the sleeping giant of the middle class and the unions, he has bigger problems to worry about.

Such as if he can ever make an appearance without having his supporters outnumbered 10:1.