Free Republic

Democrats have feared for years that one of the particular challenges of running campaigns in 2012 would be simply locating their voters. The party’s constituencies (young people, immigrants, minorities) tend to be among the most mobile demographic groups. And as NPR speculated this week in an analysis of battleground-state foreclosure figures, the housing crisis will likely only have made things more difficult for Democrats looking for their supporters. But the voter file represented a fiction, or at least a reality that had rapidly become out of date. During those eight weeks, canvassers were able to successfully find and interact with...

WASHINGTON: A 16-year-old high school student has been arrested on charges of killing an elderly Sikh in Milwaukee, where only days back a shootout at a gurdwara (temple) had left six worshippers dead. Identified as Deangelo Williams, the suspect has been charged with first-degree reckless homicide-party to a crime and possession of a firearm by a felon. If convicted he could be sentenced up to 70 years in prison. A high school student, Williams made a court appearance late Friday afternoon. The judge set bail at USD 250,000. The suspect is scheduled to be back in the court on Monday,...

Yes, transit in the Milwaukee region should be improved to give citizens, especially the many inner city residents without driver's licenses, better transportation options. And, yes, the state should ramp up transit aid and road maintenance even at the expense of new highway projects. But none of that means that reconstruction of the Zoo Interchange in Milwaukee County should be delayed and that planning for the interchange rebuild should go back to square one, as a lawsuit filed last week seeks to do. The interchange, the busiest in Wisconsin, is vital to commerce and the state's economy. It needs the...

Wisconsin -(Ammoland.com)-Wisconsin Carry has learned of some concerning information that we would like to pass along to our membership and right-to-carry interested folks in southeast Wisconsin. In a recently published Milwaukee Journal Sentinel article which you can read here It was reported that the former Badger Guns (now Brew City Shooters Supply) http://www.brewcityshooterssupply.com/ has, since 2009, been reporting the names of every customer that comes in to use their firing range to the West Milwaukee Police Department. In this time over 25,000 customer names were reported to West Milwaukee Police Chief Dennis Nasci who ran a background check on each...

[Racine, Wisc...] A Racine County Sheriff's Department official confirmed to the MacIver News Service that it is investigating the discovery of discarded election-related documents in the city of Racine. At issue are election registration forms and partisan political literature found in a dumpster behind the Cesar Chavez Community Center in the City of Racine. Upon hearing the allegations, the MacIver News Service contacted the Racine County Sheriff's department to confirm that they were looking into the matter. Captain Thomas Lamke from the Racine County Sheriff's Office responded to our inquiry and confirmed an investigation was ongoing. The department provided no...

Wisconsin state GOP. Sen. Van Wanggaard asked elections officials Friday for a recount in his recall race, the outcome of which will decide the majority party in the state Senate. An official canvass this week showed the Racine Republican trailing his Democratic challenger by 834 votes, or 1.2 percent. Democrats had called on Wanggaard to concede, saying a recount would only delay their inevitable and waste taxpayer money. But Wanggaard's campaign said it was concerned about possible reports of voting irregularities, and said it wanted to ensure the outcome was accurate. Given how many votes were cast in the election...

Democrats are having a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad June. But if it’s time to start panicking, most of them haven’t gotten the memo. Despite a spate of negative news, Democrats nationwide, both publicly and privately, seem remarkably Zen about their party’s prospects in November and unwilling to take out any frustration on their man in the Oval Office just yet. “Is there any anxiety on our side? Yes,” said Jerry Crawford, a longtime Democratic activist in Iowa. “Should the other side be feeling at least as much anxiety? Yes. There’s plenty of concern everywhere for both sides.”

This message is from Pres. Gerald W. McEntee and Sec.- Treas. Lee Saunders.By now you’ve probably heard that Scott Walker survived his recall election. To do so, he spent nearly $50 million.But with the recall of Sen. Van Wanggaard, a pro-worker majority now controls the Wisconsin Senate and we have dealt a major blow against Walker’s ability to do more damage to the working families of Wisconsin.We should all be proud of the AFSCME sisters and brothers who came together in Wisconsin and inspired workers across the country to fight back against the orchestrated attacks on the middle class.The Walker...

On Tuesday, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker won his statewide recall election 53 to 46 percent in a state that has been "blue" longer than Michigan in terms of voting for Democrats in presidential elections. Many observers said it was the biggest loss government unions have ever experienced. "It’s more than a big deal, it’s a huge deal,” said Vincent Vernuccio, Labor Policy Counsel at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. "It will embolden governors and legislators across the country. They'll know that they can stand up for taxpayers against special interests. "They’ll understand that they might have to endure some pain, but...

Much has been made of Barack Obama’s comment Friday morning that the “private sector is doing fine.” The mockery is well-deserved. The president's comment this morning has the potential to be one of those remarks that penetrates deeply into the electorate, well beyond those who keep track of the day-to-day contours of the presidential campaign. The private sector, of course, is not doing fine. GDP growth is 1.9 percent—and slowing. The private sector is adding jobs at a rate that barely outpaces population growth—and slowing. Major corporations are sitting on their cash rather than spending it, consumer confidence is down,...

By far the most amusing and telling result of the thumping the corrupt public-employee unions and out-of-state far-left zealots suffered in Wisconsin is the whining and hand-wringing now being exhibited by a growing collection of liberal pundits, politicians and ultra-wealthy activists who are uniformly saying this is a "major wake-up call for the left, Democrats and unions." No, it's not. It's a loud and clear pronouncement that big government and big-government giveaways to people who want something for nothing is over. Look at the actual results. Listen to the actual people of Wisconsin. Many were flat-out offended and angered that...

Maybe, just maybe the people of California are somehow becoming aware of the disaster that the left wing politicians have brought down upon them. Last Tuesday, while Scott Walker was smacking his recall down in Wisconsin and San Diego and San Jose were cutting the public employee pension funds, there was another possible bellwhether going on. With 100% of the votes counted in California, Proposition 29 seems to have gone down to defeat. This would have put an additional $1.00/pack tax on Cigarettes. Why is it that this may a be a "Jig is Up" bellwhether? Well, according to the...

Though it hasn't been celebrated as such, Scott Walker's victory in Wisconsin represents the full flowering of the tea party movement. It is also a sign -- among others -- that the Republican Party has recaptured its ideological core. The tea partyers are often mischaracterized as extreme right-wingers. Thus, proponents of same-sex marriage or unrestricted abortion will invoke "tea party" elements as those most opposed to their efforts. That's off target. Though many in the movement may have conservative social views, those weren't the issues that spurred them to organize, demonstrate and vote.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. — In the wake of Democrats’ loss in this week’s Wisconsin recall — and with a potentially decisive lame-duck session of Congress looming in five months — labor and liberal Democrats are digging in their heels on deficit reduction.On a Saturday morning panel at the annual Netroots Nation conference, AFL-CIO Chairman Richard Trumka renewed his criticism of the bipartisan Simpson-Bowles debt reduction plan, arguing that labor and progressive activists must “give our friends a little bit of backbone” to oppose cuts to federal entitlement programs. “If you notice, more and more Democrats have been trying to embrace Simpson-Bowles....

Labor unions and business interests have been quietly raising millions of dollars and testing campaign messages for months, girding for a brawl over a November ballot measure that could fundamentally shift political power in Sacramento. Now, on the heels of an election that saw unions handed a major defeat last week in Wisconsin, the opposing camps in California soon will launch a campaign battle likely to consume $50 million or more in political spending. "Unions have just two channels of influence," said Daniel J.B. Mitchell of the Anderson Graduate School of Management at UCLA, "collective bargaining and the political side,...

In an interview Monday with WBAY Green Bay (CBS), President Barack Obama explained his lack of appearances in Wisconsin in the months leading up to last week’s recall election, saying that he is busy with “a lot of responsibilities” and “would have loved to see a different result.” Obama has been criticized by Democrats for doing little more than tweeting his support for Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett‘s failed attempt to unseat Republican Governor Scott Walker in the recall election. I was supportive of Tom and have been supportive of Tom. Obviously, I would have loved to see a different result,...

Milwaukee police record clerks have routinely changed computer codes by hand in a way that removes serious assaults from the city's violent crime rate, a Journal Sentinel investigation has found. This is done even when the department's computer system flags the incidents as cases where an aggravated assault classification is warranted because a dangerous weapon was used. Instead of correcting the report to put the incident in the proper crime category, in hundreds of cases clerks or supervisors changed the weapon listing to generic codes that avoided triggering additional scrutiny by state and FBI crime analysts. That allowed the incidents...

Scott Walker beat the spread. Sometime politics is like betting on football. It's not just about whether your team wins. It's about whether you beat the spread. The rough calculation going into Tuesday's recall election in Wisconsin was that if Governor Scott Walker won by less than five percentage points, the race would not have any clear national-level implications, but if he won by five points or more, it would. The final result, 53.2% to 46.3%, is a margin of 6.9 percentage points. He beat the spread... --snip-- But we are finally reaching the Thatcher Line: the point at which...

Earlier we joked that some people thought today's rally was the result of the election outcome in Wisconsin last night. Well, serious people think so too. James Grant, of Grant's Interest Rate Observer, was just on CNBC, and this is what he told Maria Bartiromo: "...Today i think part of the source of the levitation was the Scott Walker triumph in Wisconsin." He explained: "People maybe are discounting the prospects of a return to something like freer if not free markets come the Fall if Romney or GOP decisively wins." Grant also said he expects a third round of quantitative...

The Democrats emerged from Tuesday's recall election with two consolation prizes. The first is that they flipped a seat in the Wisconsin state Senate, taking control of that body (which won’t convene again until after the 2012 elections). The second, and most frequently cited, is that exit polls found President Obama ahead of Mitt Romney by seven points in Wisconsin. As Markos Moulitsas of DailyKos summarized, “[a] seven-point lead, Obama over 50 percent, despite lacking participation of one of Obama's biggest constituencies (young voters), does not suggest a particularly close race this November. If Republicans want to dump their millions...