The effort to oust Wisconsin GOP Gov. Scott Walker is officially underway.
Taking the next step in a battle that’s been in the works since February, organizers planned a midnight kickoff to efforts to gather more than a half million recall petitions against GOP Gov. Scott Walker and Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch.
“There are some midnight collection events around the state. People are ready to go and want to start as soon as possible. There’s a lot of excitement about it,” said Meagan Mahaffey, executive director of United Wisconsin.
United Wisconsin, which is helping lead the recall efforts against Walker, planned a midnight electronic filing and a paper filing later Tuesday morning with state elections officials, Mahaffey said. Separate recall efforts against GOP senators also will be launched Tuesday. Meanwhile, Walker hit back with an ad campaign starting with Monday night’s Green Bay Packers game.
The recall attempt against Walker formally begins a fight that has been looming since the governor introduced a bill in February to repeal most collective bargaining for most public employees. If successful, it would be only the third recall election for a governor to be held in the nation’s history.
The group is hoping to get 600k signatures for Walker’s recall, and they need them by January 14th, 60 days away. If you’ve got friends up in Cheeseland, now’s the time to point them towards the recall effort. It’s going to be a long haul, but as Ohio’s Issue 2 proved a week ago, it can be done.
Time to send this Koch-head packing.
PeakVT
Fire Walker, With Me
jibeaux
Can I ask a simple question, sorry, I’m out of state and haven’t followed closely. If they get the signatures and they’re valid, is he recalled or does that let them get a recall election on the ballot? Is it one step or two?
cathyx
600,000, plus another 100,000 for good measure to keep out the challenges. That seems like a lot. I hope they can do it.
Willard
Good luck Wisconsin! Send this guy packing.
OT: I am considering changing my party registration from D to R. As public information, I would expect that a republican employer would potentially use this information in hiring decisions. I would not expect the same from a democrat and in this economy I need to keep my options open.
Martin
@cathyx: They better plan on more than 100K more. That’s an easy counter-strategy – having the GOP go out and put fake signatures down and then hope that they can challenge them under the 600K threshold.
If the left can raise 600K good signatures. They should assume the right will counter with 600K bad ones.
Reality Check
Good, this will increase conservative turnout in crucial swing state for taking back the Presidency. Who will steal this election this time, “progressives”? TEH KOCHTOPUS? DIEBOLD? HALLIBURTON?
THE JEWS‘THE BANKSTERS’?Get a script ready now!
Nate Dawg
@Reality Check: Anti-democratic Voter ID Laws, most likely.
Though there’s not a chance in hell you’ll take the Presidency.
Reality Check
BTW, OWS Kiddie shocked (SHOCKED!) his Masters of Fine Arts in Puppetry didn’t lead to a lucrative career!
If you pick a major like that and you’re not a trust fund baby, and even TAKE OUT LOANS to pay for it, you get what you fucking deserve. Losers.
Warren Terra
@Reality Check:
Good thing Walker’s ass will be on the line, or it would probably not occur to anyone to get out to vote in a freaking Presidential Election. Heaven knows most Conservative voters can’t be arsed to express an opinion on the subject of Barack Obama.
Reality Check
@Nate Dawg:
Oh noes, you have to show photo ID to vote! OUTRAGEOUS! BURDENSOME! IMPOSSIBLE FOR ANYONE TO COMPLY WITH!
jibeaux
@Willard: Just go unaffiliated. That way everyone will think they can woo you.
Dork
Gunna serve him his Walker’s papers.
Ben Cisco
@PeakVT: Nice.
Spaghetti Lee
@Reality Check:
You seem kinda shouty today. Getting a little worried?
Gromitt Gunn
@Royalty Check: I hope for your sake that you get paid on quantity, not quality.
Warren Terra
@Reality Check:
Apparently, 10% of African-Americans in Mississippi lack a photo ID. Fortunately, it’s inconceivable that state power should be used to depress the African-American vote in Mississippi.
Punchy
I fail to see how this post is sexist or misogynostic. Try harder Zandar.
xian
I love the funk of trolling in the morning. It smells like VICTORY !!
Nutella
@jibeaux:
The FAQ on the linked page says
“An election is called six weeks after the Wisconsin Government Accountability Board verifies the signatures. If there were a contested primary, the general election would take place four weeks after the primary election.”
Similar to what happened with the recent senate recall elections.
cathyx
@Martin: I looked it up and the entire population of Wisconsin is around 6,500,000. And that includes children, of course. To get the number of signatures needed to do this is not going to be easy.
John Weiss
@Reality Check: #8 I hope you are a sad angry white man, ’cause otherwise you’re a crazy.
Villago Delenda Est
@Punchy:
Oh, my. The snark is on the warpath today!
jibeaux
@cathyx: That is a heavy lift. Good luck, Wisconsin!
Chyron HR
@Reality Check:
Since when is Glenn “George Soros and Saul Alinsky are destroying die Fatherland!” Beck a progressive?
rb
People.
If you feel the urge to feed the troll, DON’T.
FFS.
Humanities Grad
O.K., trivia time. If Walker is recalled, the article says it’ll only be the third time in U.S. history that a sitting governor has been recalled. Who were the other two?
Gray Davis in California appears to be one. And I’d _thought_ that Evan Mecham in Arizona was the other (he was the guy who argued that Arizona shouldn’t have to recognize Martin Luther King Day, among other assorted acts of repulsiveness), but I was wrong. There WAS a recall election against Mecham in progress, but he was impeached and removed from office by the state legislature before the recall election could be held.
So who am I missing?
feebog
@ Reality Check
Obviously you do not understand the process. This is a recall election moron. It will be held following the certification by the SoS that the requiste number of valid signatures have been obtained. Look for the election to be held in April or May 2012, not November.
trollhattan
O/T Rumproast’s indespensible StrangeAppar8tus has suffered a critical medical emergency. Details, such as they are, here:
http://www.rumproast.com/index.php/site/comments/urgent_message_to_the_rumproast_community_concerning_strangeappar8us/
Because of his long-term health challenges, there are (Pennsylvania) kittehs needing new homes–a BJ specialty.
Think good thoughts!
Villago Delenda Est
@Chyron HR:
/pedant
“Das Vaterland” (Land is neuter)
die is the feminine definite article.
der is the masculine
In the nominative sense…other cases change things.
However, you’re quoting that asstard Beck who despite having a name that could be German, would not be expected to know these things, which only adds to the long list of things the stupid shitstain does not know.
Martin
@cathyx: Yeah, it’s not supposed to be easy. When it’s easy, you wind up with California.
Canuckistani Tom
@Humanities Grad:
According to Wikipedia
Lynn Frazier, N. Dakota, 1921
Humanities Grad
@ Canuckistani Tom
Nice catch. Thank you. Would’ve been a long, long, LONG time before I found that one.
kideni
I’m on the ground in Madison and have already turned in two pages of signatures less than half a day into this (yes, I’m in a neighborhood that’s blue even by Madison standards, but hey, a signature’s a signature). I think we could get a million or more. There are over 8,000 people from all over the state trained to circulate petitions, and they’re still running training sessions, so each person only has to get a hundred and we’re good. The Democrats and United Wisconsin initially thought they’d only get 5,000 petition circulators, so there’s definitely enthusiasm. Last spring during the senate recall drive, they were only in Republican districts, but now we can get people signing up in Madison, Milwaukee, and the other blue parts of the state. A lot of people have been waiting for this.
It’s true that the Republicans and their loyal trolls will do everything they can to fight this, whether with legal challenges or dirty tricks like people have been uncovering on Facebook. We also need to get a good candidate (Russ, please reconsider!), which is what makes this a little more difficult than the Ohio situation.
Make no mistake, though: the Republicans are worried. The results of the budget cuts are already being felt in education, and the governor is having a hard time spinning it. Cutting 50,000 to 65,000 people off medical assistance isn’t going over well. Wisconsin is one of the few states whose unemployment rate has been going up each month, and we’re not just losing public jobs, private jobs are disappearing too. An AP reporter was tailing me for the first block or so of my canvasing, and he got an earful from a couple of the people who all but grabbed the clipboard from my hands, they were so eager to sign.
Smiling Mortician
FWIW, NPR reports that 500,000 valid signatures are needed, not 600,000. Still, that’s a lot of signatures.
And does anyone kow why the Journal/Sentinel article uses the word “repeal” to name what Walker did to union rights? Seems fairly euphemistic, if not outright inaccurate . . . makes it sound like Walker was simply correcting an injustice. Or is “repeal” the right word and I’m just missing something?
jibeaux
@Smiling Mortician: It’s because the 500k have to be valid that they get 600k. Some will be duplicates, illegible, not voters, ratfucking Republicans, etc. And keep up the good work, kideni! Rooting for you.
Steve
This recall battle is an uphill climb, but win or lose, the side effect will be that Democrats will be much better organized in advance of the 2012 election, just like in Ohio.
TooManyJens
@Knockabout: What’s the matter, not getting your money’s worth from the blog?
Meg
Talking about sabotaging the recall efforts, from Mother Jones:
“A group of self-identified conservatives say they plan to sabotage the effort to recall Wisconsin GOP Gov. Scott Walker, which begins on Tuesday, by burning and shredding recall petitions they’ve collected and misleading Wisconsinites about the recall process.”
gbear
@Meg: I wonder if they know that what they’re doing is a felony?
gwangung
@kideni: Go, go go!!!!
gwangung
@gbear: Felony? Them? Can’t be! They’re GOOD people!
Three-nineteen
@gbear: Nope, one of the guys interviewed on the Milwaukee news (he states that he was joking) told the reporter that collecting signatures and then shredding them wasn’t breaking any laws.
Ian
@Reality Check:
The recall election will most not likely be on the same day as the POTUS one.
Nice try tho.
Amir Khalid
@Villago Delenda Est:
Your correction is correct; but in the sentence quoted by Chyron HR, “Vaterland” is actually the direct object, so the accusative case would apply, not the nominative (subject) case.
binzinerator
Signed the petition today. Plus one to recall Walker’s Teabagger Lt. governor, Rebecca Kleefisch.
We all know what Walker is. Kleefisch is another republican asshole, the kind that sounds all-too-familiar. You may recollect she made national news last year during her campaign with her saying same sex marriage is like marrying a dog, or a piece of fruniture.
During her campaign she was diagnosed with colon cancer. It’s a terrible thing, and I hope she beats it. I would have a lot more sympathy for her than I do — except during her campaign she ran ads attacking the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Nothing says Teabagger Hypocrite Asshole like being covered for your chemo by government-provided health insurance while demanding 30 million people go without any insurance, without little chance to treat their life-threatening illnesses.
I’d like to ask her if she feels differently now about PPACA, if she wonders how many of that 30 million will be diagnosed in the next year with cancer, and like her they have a chance to beat it because they now can have insurance that will pay for things like chemotherapy, and if she might now reconsider her position on that.
I’d like to think she’d change her mind, but I’m not counting on that. That’s why I signed.