JoAnn Kloppenburg is running for Wisconsin Supreme Court once again

You may remember Wisconsin Court of Appeals judge JoAnn Kloppenburg, then a Wisconsin Assistant Attorney General, from the contentious 2011 Wisconsin Supreme Court race, where she narrowly lost to conservative incumbent David “The Choker” Prosser by a few thousand votes in a race that featured an infamous vote-counting snafu in Waukesha County, the most populous right-wing stronghold in Wisconsin.

Well, she’s back! Kloppenburg is making another run for a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court. This time, she’s running for the seat currently held by incumbent justice Patrick Crooks, who is the lone moderate on Wisconsin’s highest bench. Here’s her campaign announcement video.

There are going to be three main differences between Kloppenburg’s 2011 campaign and her 2016 campaign:

• In 2011, Kloppenburg ran against David Prosser, an ultra-conservative state supreme court justice who is a controversial figure in Wisconsin politics. This time, she’s running for the seat currently held by Patrick Crooks, who, while technically a Republican, has generally sided against the conservative majority on the constitutional crisis involving the Wisconsin Constitution amendment that gives the justices on Wisconsin’s highest bench to power to vote for one of their own to be chief justice. The amendment is currently subject to an ongoing lawsuit involving a dispute over when the amendment is supposed to go into effect. It’s not clear as to whether or not Crooks will run for re-election at this time, and Crooks’s campaign has not commented on Kloppenburg entering the race that I’m aware of.
• In 2011, due to the union-busting Act 10 having been enacted not too long before the supreme court race that year, there was far higher turnout than what would normally be seen for a state supreme court race in Wisconsin. This year, turnout is probably going to be either at the level of what would be expected for a supreme court race in Wisconsin (typically about one-third of that of a midterm election in Wisconsin) or somewhat higher, depending on whether or not one or both major parties has a serious nomination contest for president ongoing by April of next year. I’m guessing that the 2016 presidential primaries in Wisconsin will be held in April, although the Republicans who control Wisconsin’s state government may move the primaries up to February to try to give Scott Walker a better chance of winning the Republican presidential nomination, but there’s nothing confirmed about that at this time.
• Kloppenburg’s potential opponents include incumbent justice Patrick Crooks, Milwaukee County Circuit Court judge Joe Donald, Wisconsin Court of Appeals judge Rebecca Bradley, and Former Wisconsin Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen. I know very little about Donald, other than the fact that he was originally appointed to the Milwaukee County bench by Former Republican Governor Tommy Thompson, and the fact he’s been praised by Ed Fallone, the Marquette University professor who ran for state supreme court in 2013 on a progressive message and platform (losing to conservative incumbent Pat Roggensack, who is now the acting chief justice of the court pending the lawsuit regarding the chief justice amendment that I explained above). Van Hollen and Bradley are right-wing judicial activists, especially Bradley, who has known ties to far-right judicial activist groups like the Federalist Society and has donated money to Scott Walker’s gubernatorial campaigns. Donald is all but certain to run; I’m not sure if Van Hollen and/or Bradley are interested in running or not.

I am not endorsing a candidate for Wisconsin Supreme Court at this time, but I may do so at some point before the spring 2016 elections in Wisconsin.

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Nation Consulting’s ties to Republican firms run even further

AUTHOR’S NOTE #1: This is an update to a previous blog post about Milwaukee, Wisconsin-based Nation Consulting’s ties to Republican front groups.

AUTHOR’S NOTE #2: I have made edits to the blog post in order to ensure that the blog post is 100% accurate.

Since my last blog post about Nation Consulting’s ties to Republican organizations, I’ve had an individual point out to me via a Facebook group that Coalition for the New Economy (CftNE), a group that opposes government-owned broadband internet services in areas where the private sector operates broadband services, had paid DCI Group, a mostly right-wing public relations, lobbying, and consulting firm, a total of $666,957 for work that DCI Group did for CftNE as an independent contractor, per a 2012 IRS 990 filing by CftNE (you can find that filing here; the information I mentioned in this paragraph comes from page 9 of the PDF file). CftNE was led by Thad Nation at the time of the filing; Nation is also the founder of Nation Consulting, a Milwaukee, Wisconsin-based consulting firm.

While DCI Group supported the effort to allow openly-LGBT people to serve in our nation’s Armed Forces, something which should have been done sooner, a lot of the other things they’ve been involved with is, in my opinion, clearly against the best interests of the American people.

DCI Group has been behind anti-climate change campaigns, including an infamous YouTube video in 2006 that spoofed the Al Gore film An Inconvenient Truth, in which Gore, who was Vice President of the United States during the presidency of Bill Clinton, talked about how serious of a threat climate change is to this planet. While DCI Group has never actually acknowledged its role in the Gore parody, multiple media outlets reported that a Yahoo! email from the same person who uploaded the YouTube video originated from a computer registered to DCI Group. DCI Group’s officials include, among many others, Doug Goodyear, the CEO of the firm and a former political director of the Colorado Republican Party, and Craig Stevens, who worked on two Republican presidential campaigns and also worked for Tommy Thompson when he was U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services under Republican President George W. Bush. Perhaps the worst thing that DCI Group has associated itself with is the former military junta in the Southeast Asian country of Myanmar, also known as Burma. DCI Group conducted public relations work on behalf of the Burmese junta from 2002 to 2003. The Burmese junta was known for flagrant human rights violations, including the politically-motivated house imprisonment of Aung San Suu Kyi. DCI Group’s work with the Burmese junta became a major controversy in the 2008 presidential election here in the U.S., as Goodyear worked with the McCain campaign prior to the media publishing reports about DCI Group’s work with the Burmese junta.

It’s 100% clear to me that Thad Nation, who is the founder of Nation Consulting and either is or was the head of CftNE, plays both sides of the street politically. While their founder, Thad Nation, has at least indirectly funded right-wing organizations, Nation Consulting, which Nation himself founded, also employs Jason Rae, who also happens to be a Democratic National Committee (DNC) member and a candidate for Chairperson of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin (DPW). That is an inconvenient truth for Rae, as it’s at least an apparent conflict of interest, if not an outright one, for Rae to be DPW chair and working for a firm led by someone who either is or was also the head of a different organization that gave money to Republican and Republican-leaning organizations simultaneously.