Yesterday, John Nichols of the Nation Magazine dropped a phone call to the Randi Rhodes show to talk about how Scott Walker may have committed a serious ethics violation in a State that has, in his words, the "toughest ethics Laws in the country":
Whoops.
Here's the opening bit from Mr. Nichols Nation piece that was mentioned:
When Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker discussed strategies to lay off state employees for political purposes, to coordinate supposedly “independent” political expenditures to aid legislatures who support his budget repair bill and to place agent provocateurs on the streets of Madison in order to disrupt peaceful demonstrations, he committed what the former attorney general of Wisconsin says could turn out to be serious ethics, election law and labor violations.
While much of the attention to the “prank” call that the governor took from a blogger who identified himself as billionaire David Koch [1] has focused on the bizarre, at times comic, character of the discussion between a blogger posing [2] as a powerful political player on the right and a governor whose budget repaid bill has sparked mass demonstrations in Wisconsin communities and a national outcry, the state’s former chief law-enforcement officer described the governor’s statements as “deeply troubling” and suggested that they would require inquiry and investigation by watchdog agencies.
“There clearly are potential ethics violations, and there are potential election-law violations and there are a lot of what look to me like labor-law violations,” said Peg Lautenschlager [3], a Democrat who served as Wisconsin’s attorney general after serving for many years as a US Attorney. “I think that the ethics violations are something the [state] Government Accountability Board should look into because they are considerable. He is on tape talking with someone who he thinks is the funder of an independent political action committee to purchase advertising to benefit Republican legislators who are nervous about taking votes on legislation he sees as critical to his political success.”
Lautenschlager, a former legislator who has known Walker for many years and who has worked with many of the unions involved in the current dispute, says: “One of the things I find most problematic in all of this is the governor’s casual talk about using outside troublemakers to stir up trouble on the streets, and the fact that he only dismissed the idea because it might cause a political problem for him.”
You can find the rest here. (It's not behind a paywall, but don't be surprised if they ask you for your Email and zip code).
I've got to say, reading the piece, Nichols didn't write much more than was in the interview. Sometimes, you listen to a journalist on the TeeVee or the Radio, and hear about what they're working on, and you go in expecting a universe's worth of difference between what he or she wrote, and what they said...
...and there wasn't a universe's worth of difference.
That being said, one gets the distinct feeling that Mr. Nichols is just getting warmed up.
The original Faux David Koch call is here:
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