Uppity Wisconsin

Golly! Is Wisconsin Attorney General J. B. Van Hollen a crazy socialist, or WHAT?

He has allocated more than $700,000 to continue funding "Drug Endangered Children Teams" for Methamphetamine abuse in the state. Go figure.

Of course, this problem was originally pursued aggressively in the Cheese State by the remarkable former AG Peggy Lautenschlager. Nice follow-up though ... as long as it leads to rehabilitation over crazy convictions.

Update: Van Hollen as panelist at the rightwing Federalist Society last year

As the Republican Party continues its lies about its voter suppression program, the Democratic Party is setting the record straight.

Just released is a fact sheet and timeline demonstrating the ever-changing stories of the duplicitous JB Van Hollen, McCain co-chair and Wisconsin Attorney General, and his GOP as they attempt to prevent as many (wrong-voting) people as possible from voting this November.

The fact-sheet is worth reproducing in its entirety.

Fact Sheet: Van Hollen’s Web of Deceit, Cover Ups
and Collusion with Republicans on GAB Lawsuit

(Wednesday, September 24, 2008)

The first thing you'd have to do to recall Wisconsin Attorney General J. B. Van Hollen is file a campaign registration statement with intent to recall with the Wisconsin Government Accountability Board Elections Division.

Next, you need signatures from 25% of the people who voted in the 2006 gubernatorial election in Wisconsin. That number was around 2,159,251, so 25% of that is 539,813 signatures.

You'd need a fracking boatload of well-organized volunteers to meet the 60-day deadline requirement from the time you filed the intent to recall.

Then the filing officer at GAB has 31 days to determine if the signatures collected are sufficient to meet all the legal requirements.

After those 31 days, Van Hollen has 10 days to challenge those signatures. You'd actually want the boatload of volunteers to collect at least 600,000 to make the entire effort bulletproof.

When he was running for Attorney General, JB Van Hollen made a fake lament about “frivolous” lawsuits a major part of his stump speech. After all of that grandstanding who could forget him then filing his own frivolous lawsuit because he didn’t like a hard hitting ad that was run against him? Later, after he won a very close election, he abandoned the suit and even had to pay for the other side’s legal bills. If it wasn’t clear at the beginning that the suit was frivolous, it certainly was at the conclusion of the matter.

It is within this context and pattern of behavior that we  now find J.B. Van Hollen filing what is yet another partisan politically motivated lawsuit. What makes this one so much worse is that he is doing it with taxpayer money while at the same time threatening many of those same taxpayer’s right to vote. This latest suit is against the state’s own Government Accountability Board (GAB), so Van Hollen has taxpayers paying on both ends of this one.