News

Firefighters Trash DNC for Lack of Aid in the Recall

For weeks Democrats in Wisconsin have been putting pressure on the national Democratic Party to do more for the upcoming June 5 recall election. The Republican Governors Association and the national Republican Party, headed by Wisconsinite Reince Priebus, are "all in" on the Walker campaign, bringing in a string of Republican governors to campaign on behalf of Walker and spending millions on fundraising and TV ads. In response to the pressure, Democratic National Committee (DNC) Chair, Florida Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, sent an email to Democrats around the country on May 23 asking for help for Walker's challenger, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett. But with less than two weeks before the election, Democrats and labor leaders are steamed. Today, the fight broke into the open when International Association of Fire Fighters President Harold Schaitberger, told The Hill: "I'm very disappointed that the DNC has not seen fit to make a dollar investment," Schaitberger said. "When you're facing $25 million or more in super-PAC funds, you need money. The campaign needed funds to get up on the air to fight back. ... I think that would have been a good investment going into November."

Amazon.com General Counsel Michelle Wilson announced at a shareholder meeting in Seattle this morning that Amazon has decided not to renew its membership in the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) this year. Dave Johnson, a Fellow at Campaign for America's Future, is reporting from the shareholder meeting and confirmed to the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) that he heard the announcement.

Members of ColorOfChange.org, CREDO Mobile, People for the American Way, Progressive Change Campaign Committee, SumOfUs, and Fuse Washington carried a petition to the shareholder meeting containing over 500,000 signatures and calling on Amazon.com and other corporations to stop funding ALEC. According to ColorOfChange.org, organizational representatives tried to deliver the petition signatures to the meeting but were turned away.

Not Dead Yet: New Poll Shows Barrett and Walker in Dead Heat

A new poll sponsored by "We Are Wisconsin" shows a closer race between Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett and Governor Scott Walker than other recent polls. Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research did a survey on behalf of the labor PAC that sampled 472 recall voters from May 19 to 21. In that poll, Walker leads Barrett 50 to 47, but the results remain within the poll's four-point margin of error. Last week's Marquette University Law School poll showed Scott Walker ahead of Tom Barrett, 50 to 44 percent. Recent analysis of the Marquette poll, however, has shown that it "oversampled" conservatives, who were more likely to vote for Walker. John Nichols in the Capital Times describes how this oversampling explains Walker's gain in its entirety:

Members of Congress Raise Questions about Walker's 2011 Testimony

Three Democratic members of the House Oversight Committee wrote to Chairman Darrell Issa requesting that he obtain clarification from Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker of his testimony before the Committee on April 14, 2011, in light of a new videotape that surfaced recently that appears to contradict his statements.