"The Journal Sentinel’s Daniel Bice has seized on the tape to assert that it 'contradicts' Archer’s claims..."

"... telling a 'different story' from the one she told National Review and the one she told in her lawsuit. In reality, however, the tape omits all of the most critical moments of the raid, and corroborates Archer’s account in many key respects. To the extent it exposes differences between what was recorded and Archer’s recollection, those differences actually offer slight encouragement to those who wish to see law-enforcement officials obey constitutional mandates...."

David French (in The National Review) has some perspective on that Daniel Bice piece we were talking about yesterday.

"Two defendants... Judge Neal Nettesheim, who oversaw the John Doe probe, to unseal the audio file and other documents from the supposedly secret proceeding for the first time."

Maybe the 6 a.m. raid on Cindy Archer's home was not as traumatic as she claims in her lawsuit.



According to Daniel Bice at The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the audio conflicts with the way Archer characterizes the experience:

That recording details tense but mannerly exchanges between Archer and Aaron Weiss, an investigator with the Milwaukee County District Attorney's Office, as he led a team of officers during an early morning raid on Archer's home as part of a now infamous John Doe probe.

“I'm sort of doing you a courtesy by letting you get a coffee and smoke a cigarette just because I imagine being woken up at six in the morning by a bunch of people in black suits is not the way you want to wake up in the day,” Weiss said at one point.

I'm sort of doing you a courtesy by letting you get a coffee....

"Fired staffer accuses Tammy Baldwin's office of coverup in VA scandal."

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports.

In a 16-page complaint, Baylor is asking the U.S. Senate Ethics Select Committee to investigate the first-term senator "for making false statements and representations" to cover up the actions by her chief of staff, Bill Murat, and "to protect her political career."

"Had Murat, as the chief of staff, allowed me and other individuals to properly perform our roles, the issues surrounding the Tomah VA Medical Center would have been identified and addressed long ago," Baylor said in the complaint drafted by a Republican law firm out of Kansas City. "By attempting to place to place the blame at my feet, Senator Baldwin has concealed the truth, made false statements, and mischaracterized my service as deputy state director."

"Do you wonder why people are so mixed up when the bimbos the TV stations send out don’t even know what the bill does?"

Said Mark Belling on the radio, using a word that the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's Daniel Bice questions:

OK, "bimbo" is a little dated. Still, should Belling be using that term to deride female TV journalists? What's his term du jour for their incompetent male counterparts?

When I hear "bimbo," I think of "bimbo eruptions," a term coined by Governor Bill Clinton's chief of staff Betsey Ross Wright:

As deputy chair of the 1992 Clinton presidential campaign, Wright established the rapid response system that was responsible for defending Clinton's record in Arkansas and promptly answering all personal attacks on the candidate. During the 1992 campaign, Wright coined the term "bimbo eruptions" to describe rumors alleging extramarital affairs by Clinton. 

How sexual is the term "bimbo"? Can it just mean idiot or does Belling seem to be insinuating that the reporter is slutty?

By the way, "bimbo" originally referred to a male, as the "o" ending suggests. (It means "baby" in the original Italian.) The oldest English usage is for "A fellow, chap; usu. contemptuous." That goes back to 1919, with the female meaning arriving a decade later: "A woman; esp. a whore." That's from the (unlinkable) OED, which has a draft addition from 2004: "derogatory. A young woman considered to be sexually attractive but of limited intelligence. (Now the usual sense.)" The OED quotes a Woody Allen story from 1976, "The Whore of Mensa":

"I'm on the road a lot. You know how it is - lonely. Oh, not what you're thinking. See, Kaiser, I'm basically an intellectual. Sure, a guy can meet all the bimbos he wants. But the really brainy women - they're not so easy to find on short notice."

ADDED: I searched for "bimbo" in Carl Bernstein's book about Hillary "A Woman in Charge," and I found this quote from "one of her aides":

She doesn’t look at her life as a series of crises but rather a series of battles. I think of her viewing herself in more heroic terms, an epic character like in The Iliad, fighting battle after battle. Yes, she succumbs to victimization sometimes, in that when the truth becomes too painful, when she is faced with with the repercussions of her own mistakes or flaws, she falls into victimhood. But that’s a last resort and when she does allow the wallowing it’s only in the warm glow of martyrdom—as a laudable victim—a martyr in the tradition of Joan of Arc, a martyr in the religious sense. She would much rather play the woman warrior—whether it’s against the bimbos, the press, the other party, the other candidate, the right-wing. She’s happiest when she’s fighting, when she has identified the enemy and goes into attack mode…. That’s what she thrives on more than anything—the battle.

"Why would Democratic gubernatorial candidate Mary Burke choose someone once charged with domestic abuse to star in her latest campaign ad?"

Asks Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's Daniel Bice.

"Scott Walker's son acted as witness in gay marriage."

Daniel Bice reports.

Laurel Patrick, a spokeswoman for the governor, confirmed Thursday that Walker's son was present for the event for the lesbian couple.... "Shelli Marquardt is the first lady's cousin," Patrick said in a statement. "She is a part of the Walker family who they dearly love."... Patrick did not say whether the governor or first lady attended the same-sex wedding last month. Alex Walker did not respond to emails on Thursday.

"Just heard the fabulous news from tonette," one relative recently wrote on Facebook... "We are thrilled for you both. Congrats and much love from the Tarantino Gang in Az.!!" Tarantino is the first lady's maiden name....

ADDED: This post is just another post in my year-plus effort to convey the message to you old-not-young conservatives: It's over.

IN THE COMMENTS: TCom, talking about me, says "As a gay man, I find her pompous stance on this issue to be more than a little annoying," and I say: "LOL. What a concept. Of course, I'm committed to the opposite" with a link to this, from over a year ago:

[EMBEDDED VIDEO REMOVED]

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel looks into the basis for Mary Burke's claim of business executive expertise.

Daniel Bice writes:

Burke says she boosted European sales for Trek Bicycle, her family's business, from $3 million a year in 1990 to $50 million in 1993. Only the former Trek executive says there aren't any reports, memos, newsletters or other records to support her claim because the Waterloo-based firm is a private company.

But Bice found records that show that Trek's overall sales increase in that period was only $107 million. It's hard to believe that nearly half of that increase came from Europe.  Bice also found an old newspaper article quoting a company official saying that sales in Europe, Canada, and Japan together rose $30 million in the period 1991 to 1994.

A Burke spokesman says: "These pathetic attempts to discredit Mary Burke's track record of success creating good-paying jobs in Wisconsin are a joke." How can you rest on the "track record" and the contention that there are no records... especially when a journalists finds some records? What's "pathetic"? The only thing that's pathetic is that no one had even gone this deeply into the claim of a record of executive experience made by a person who is asking us to hire her as our state's executive.

Bice quotes a UW-Milwaukee political science professor: "She can't put out such a specific claim and then say it's a secret."

Quite aside from whether the number is correct, what did Burke herself do that caused the sales to increase? The bikes are a great product. It's not surprising that sales increased. What did Burke do that had a causal effect? We've seen many commercials with her asserting that she knows how to grow businesses, but if having a great product is how, that's not anything she's done, but only a way in which she's been fortunate in life. Now, if you grew sales with a mediocre product, your role would be more impressive.

Bice goes on to note that when Burke became the state's secretary of commerce in the Doyle administration, her résumé said she boosted Trek's European sales from $2 million to $60 million, but now she's saying from $3 million to $50 million. And: "She left in the summer of 1993 to begin a two-year break from the firm." Has anyone given us any depth about why she left and what she did? The election is only a few weeks away. You'd think it would come up.

ADDED: We'll see if it comes up in the debates, the first of which is tomorrow at 7, moderated by Jill Geisler, with panelists Keith Edwards (WQOW), Judy Clark (WEAU), Mike Thompson (WKBT), and Shawn Johnson (Wisconsin Public Radio). That's a lot of panelists, so there's a good chance for somebody to distinguish himself or herself with some specific questions. I can imagine the mind-numbing I-know-how-to-grow-business generalities that will waste our time if the candidates are allowed to run out the clock. I'll be live-blogging, keeping my eye on these journalist characters, so stay tuned.

Stuart Taylor Jr. advances his John Doe investigation story by publishing his long list of questions to the prosecutor John Chisholm.

I'm not surprised that Chisholm declines to answer Taylor's long list of questions, even though Chisholm did speak up in response to Taylor's original attack and seemingly went to some trouble in an effort to to impugn Michael Lutz. Lutz was Taylor's unnamed source for the article that depicted the prosecutor and his office as highly politicized and openly antagonistic to Governor Scott Walker.

The questions standing alone go a long way toward rehabilitating Lutz after the attack on his credibility and they also work to restate and emphasize Lutz's original charges against Chisholm. Taylor observes that Chisholm has generally denied that he had a political agenda, but that he doesn't seem to have denied the specific allegations that Lutz had made. This corresponds to what I wrote when I saw Chisholm's response:

Reading [Taylor's original attack and Chisholm's response], I'm thinking that Taylor raised suspicions that Chisholm and his lawyers and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel have not adequately refuted. I want to see a specific statement from Chisholm that goes into the details, something more than expressions of outrage and denials that could be based on Chisholm's belief that he compartmentalized his prosecutorial decisionmaking and his personal political beliefs and husbandly tenderness.

Were there blue fist signs in the office and other expressions of support for unions and antagonism to Walker? What was the extent of participation in the protests? Did Chisholm speak openly about his wife's feelings in the context of the case? Taylor's article created a strong motivation to respond on that level, and neither Chisholm nor his lawyer provided that response.

So I'm pleased to see Taylor taking this approach — with far more detailed questions —and I'll reprint Taylor's questions below:

"For the 2nd time in 4 days, Democrat Mary Burke's campaign has been hit by charges that it lifted passages from other sources and used them in its campaign literature."

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's Dan Bice passes along material "turned up by Republican Gov. Scott Walker's campaign and made available to No Quarter and BuzzFeed." I don't trust the Sentinel to dig into anything that might help Scott Walker, but Walker's campaign was smart enough to say that it was sending the same material to Buzzfeed, which ran a big story last Thursday — based on its own investigation — "Wisconsin Democratic Gubernatorial Candidate Fires Campaign Consultant For Large Portions Of Copied Jobs Plan." There's web traffic to consider, along with whatever is left these days of a journalistic conscience.

After the Buzzfeed revelations, apparently the Walker campaign went looking for more of the same, which is clever. Everyone should be running that plagiarism software on all the other side's literature... and on their own, because you'd better be careful about using this kind of attack if you have any vulnerability. Here's how Bice describes what Walker's campaign found:

The material includes two Burke plans — one on rural communities and the other veterans issues — that include passages from several websites as well as Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett's "Plan to Create Wisconsin Jobs," which he used during his 2010 campaign for governor. There are seven instances of disputed material. Most of the material is less than a paragraph long, and in some cases, fragments of sentences. In four cases, the Burke documents cited the other online material but did not place the borrowed passages in quotes. All in all, the seven passages are not as substantial or egregious as the unattributed use of language by Burke's jobs plan. But a top Walker aide was still ready to pounce....

The copying was not that bad. Not as bad as that other stuff anyway. And Walker is mean: He's pouncing. Bice is, as usual, eager to help the Democratic Party candidate. The Walker aide made the obvious argument, that there's a pattern — "a disturbing pattern of intellectual dishonesty."

Bice contacted Burke, who hadn't seen the new material:

But she did note that Eric Schnurer — the consultant who has taken the hit for the purloined passages in her jobs plan — also worked on her 25-page rural plan, "Invest in Our Rural Communities." Her campaign cut ties with Schnurer late last week.

"I don't think it should be any surprise that we are drawing on best practices and ideas that have worked elsewhere," Burke said. "But in no circumstances should there be the same wording around those."

It must be Schnurer again, Mary muses, then, thinking out loud and a little carelessly, adding that anything lifted should have been reworded. (That seems to say: You get caught when you use verbatim passages.)

I wonder if Schnurer will ever fight back. His professional reputation is getting ravaged, but defending himself would require attacking the candidate, and attacking his own candidate would also hurt his reputation. Maybe he'll keep silent until after the election and decide what to do when he sees whether Burke wins or loses. Has Bice or Buzzfeed tried to talk to Schnurer? If he's refusing to speak, is that a completely independent decision? I'd like to know.

Stuart Taylor Jr. responds to the attack on his source for the story about the political atmosphere in the office of the John Doe prosecutor.

This follows up on something discussed on this blog a week ago in "John Doe prosecutor John Chisholm objects to what Stuart Taylor Jr. said about his anti-Walker vendetta" and "Did Stuart Taylor Jr. misidentify his unnamed source for his article impugning the motives of the John Doe prosecutor?"  In that second post, I'd said:

It's not just that the source (as revealed by [Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's Daniel] Bice) seems pretty untrustworthy. What bothers me most here is that Taylor would pass him off as a "longtime Chisholm subordinate" and "former staff prosecutor in Chisholm’s office" if he was a short-time, unpaid, paper-shuffler. Taylor needs to weigh in.

Stuart Taylor now weighs in with "Decorated Wis. cop says he paid dearly for blowing whistle on DA’s crusade against Gov. Walker":

Did Stuart Taylor Jr. misidentify his unnamed source for his article impugning the motives of the John Doe prosecutor?

Here's yesterday's post, "John Doe prosecutor John Chisholm objects to what Stuart Taylor Jr. said about his anti-Walker vendetta." Taylor called his source a "longtime Chisholm subordinate" and "former staff prosecutor in Chisholm’s office":

Stuart Taylor quotes his unnamed source as saying "it was surprising how almost hyper-partisan [Chisholm] became." And:

Chisholm “had almost like an anti-Walker cabal of people in his office who were just fanatical about union activities and unionizing. And a lot of them went up and protested. They hung those blue fists on their office walls [to show solidarity with union protestors] … At the same time, if you had some opposing viewpoints that you wished to express, it was absolutely not allowed.”

Now, we have the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's Daniel Bice purporting to reveal Taylor's source as a former police officer and current criminal defense attorney, who worked as an "unpaid special prosecutor for 5 1/2 months in the county office in 2011 [and] spent most of his time filling out grant applications for the community prosecution program."

Mary Burke — Scott Walker's opponent in the gubernatorial election — puzzles some people and I think I've solved the puzzle.

Daniel Bice, at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, under the headline "Mary Burke scrutinized for 2-year hiatus, 'snowboarding sabbatical,'" begins by calling Burke's "work history" "pretty straightforward." But here's the career path that he thinks makes sense on the face of it:

Georgetown University. Harvard University. Trek Bicycle. State Department of Commerce. Madison School Board.

To me that doesn't make obvious sense. Why would a Harvard MBA, after serving in her family's business and proceeding to the position of Secretary of Commerce in the state government, have as her next position nothing more than a seat on a municipal school board?

Anyway, Bice ignores that mystery. It's a nonmystery. Nothing to see there. It's "straightforward."

"We're sorry if campaign law has become so complex that the relevant details can't fit in a newspaper article..."

Say the editors of the Wall Street Journal in "A First Amendment Education/What the press corps isn't telling you about the Scott Walker probe."

(Link will work for nonsubscribers to the WSJ.)

ADDED: Since I'm adding the "Daniel Bice" tag, I want to quote this part of the article:

In a recent online chat, a reader asked Daniel Bice, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's go-to reporter for prosecutors, why his articles failed to explain the difference between "express advocacy" and "issue advocacy"—a crucial distinction in the law on coordination between political campaigns and outside groups.

"The reason we don't go into great detail on express advocacy is that you can't discuss it without going into great detail. As you just did," Mr. Bice responded. So Mr. Bice admits that he leaves out crucial information because it's all so very complicated.

We're sorry if campaign law has become so complex that the relevant details can't fit in a newspaper article, but allow us to give it a try.

Wisconsin GOP convention will vote on "Wisconsin's right, under extreme circumstances, to secede."

"A version of the so-called 'state sovereignty' resolution was first OK'd last month by one of the state GOP's eight regional caucuses as an assertion of the state's 10th Amendment rights," Daniel Bice reports in the Milwaukee State Journal.

Top Republican officials hoped to kill the fringe proposal during a meeting of the resolutions panel at the Hyatt Hotel in Milwaukee on April 5. Instead, the committee made a few edits to the resolution and adopted it on a split vote....

Governor Scott Walker said: "I don't think that one aligns with where most Republican officials are in the state of Wisconsin — certainly not with me."

Wisconsin Citizens Media Co-op drops a load on Scott Walker.

Beginning with an "Editor's Note" — presumably an attempt at deflecting a defamation lawsuit — that reads:

What follows is one woman's account of the Scott Walker she knew at Marquette University. To the extent possible we have verified its accuracy, including the accuracy of details not printed here in order to protect the identities of the people involved. All of the elements are consistent: the principals were at Marquette University when the incidents recounted here allegedly happened, and "Ruth" did have a baby shortly thereafter. However, attempts to reach "Ruth" and her first husband have been unsuccessful, as phone numbers listed for each have been disconnected, and so far we have not been able to independently verify Bernadette's account.

They are orgasmic at Daily Kos — "OMFG!! Scott Walker's Got a Love Child?!?!"

Via Jay (in a comments thread here), who says: "Can you smell the desperation?"

Yes, I can. The recall election is Tuesday. I was going to link to something really desperate in Isthmus this morning, but the Isthmus site seems to be crashed right now. There's a lot of desperation and maybe all the desperados went there at once. Well, this is the link, if it works. The article is called something like Legal Cloud Gathers Over Scott Walker, and it purports to have sources that say that Walker is the target of a criminal investigation. Ah! The site is back. It's "Legal cloud gathers over Scott Walker as recall election approaches":

With the recall election only two days away, federal prosecutors are closing in on Governor Scott Walker, according to veteran political reporter David Shuster, former Attorney General Peg Lautenschlager, and former district attorney Bob Jambois.

In a conference call organized by state Democrats on Saturday evening, June 2, Shuster, Lautenschlager, and Jambois laid out evidence that Walker is a target of a federal investigation.

Wisconsin Democratic Party Communications Director Graeme Zielinski added that there is evidence of wrongdoing after Walker's time as Milwaukee County Executive, and that the investigation includes criminal activity during his time as governor.

Based on conversations with a lawyer who has knowledge of the investigation....

Quite the "legal cloud," no? It's less of a cloud of law than a swarm of Democrats. Desperate Democrats. Embarrassing. You just had a former President appear on behalf of your candidate. Why not a little grace and dignity as you approach the end?

UPDATE: "Daniel Bice, the 'Watchdog' reporter of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Online interviewed the anonymous woman who had the baby, but she adamantly denied that Scott Walker was the father according to a comment by Daniel Bice to the linked story." I wonder if Daniel Bice knows anything about the lawyer with knowledge of the federal investigation.

Accusations of vote buying in the Wisconsin recall elections.

Daniel Bice writes:

[I]t is clear the Milwaukee County district attorney's office is investigating charges that Wisconsin Right to Life offered rewards for volunteers....

During the recall races, [Wisconsin Right to Life] had sent an email that... offered "rewards for volunteers who make an impact over the weekend by educating and encouraging family and friends to vote by absentee ballot."

Those who signed up 15 "pro-life/pro-family voters" by July 5 would get a $25 gift or gas card as a reward. The person signing up the most people in each Senate district would win a $75 gift or gas card....

[Assistant District Attorney Bruce Landgraf] acknowledged in August that he was looking into a complaint by the state Republican Party and Media Trackers, a conservative advocacy group, over what has been dubbed the BBQ-for-votes scandal.

Wisconsin Jobs Now, a coalition of community and labor groups led by the Service Employees International Union, held at least five parties on Milwaukee's northwest side in which it offered voters free food (including chicken and ribs from Speed Queen), drawings for prizes and free shuttles to Milwaukee City Hall so they could cast absentee ballots in the Darling-Pasch contest.

Both groups defend their activities as legal.