POWIP Piece of Work In Progress – Former Abode of Dan Collins

Professor Cronon, DisIngenue

I've written about UW-Madison's Professor Cronon a number of times, but most particularly here, here, here and here, with Chancellor Biddy Martin's follow-up, here.

I mention it because the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel's Patrick McIlheran took a cudgel to the professor today, agreeing with me pretty much point for point on the issues. But here's some background of which I wasn't aware:

The Cap Times piece also checked into whether the GOP’s trawl through Cronon’s in-box was untoward. Answer: No.

“It was a little more than a year ago, for example, that the liberal advocacy group One Wisconsin Now used information gleaned through an open records request to question the credibility of a polling project led by UW-Madison political science professor Ken Goldstein.

“Donald Downs, a UW-Madison political science professor, echoes the thought that such requests are far from an isolated matter.

“ ‘Open records requests appear to have been taken to a new level, making some of them tools of partisan political combat,’ Downs says. ‘Over the past year, there have been other cases beyond Cronon’s. … And some liberal bloggers are now calling for open records requests against (UW-Madison Law School professor and conservative blogger) Ann Althouse in retaliation for Cronon. So Cronon’s situation is sadly not alone.’ ”

Presumably it shouldn’t have seemed so to Cronon, either. He could not have been so disconnected as to know nothing of these other cases. More to the point, he could not be so naïve as to think that when, as a state employee with access to state computers specifically off-limits to politicking, he decided to be political player, his use of equipment would go unquestioned. And surely he did not imagine that calling the governor McCarthy-like in the national press was mere academic inquiry.

I’m not enamored of the Republicans’ use of the open records law in this case – if they weren’t meaning to vex Cronon, they were indifferent to the request’s vexatious nature – but neither do I think it’s a singular outrage. The law is legitimate, and it doesn’t contain an exemption for professors with proper viewpoints. The object of the Republicans’ hunt – to see whether taxpayer resources got commandeered into air cover for the unions – was less trivial than the demand by a Madison newspaper and the Associated Press for emails to Walker so they could prove him wrong (at which they failed).

Donald Downs, for those who aren't aware, is among other things an advocate for campus free speech. It was his advocacy, among other things, that got the squealer speech-code violation drop boxes removed from the campus. Yes, they had them, and some lunatics probably deemed them as important as those assault light, siren and speaker boxes that they have all over campus, because they are unable to recognize the difference between a figure of speech and an act of physical violence, so sophisticated have they become.

Goodness knows, Professor Cronon's another such victim, if you listen to him tell the tale. McIlheran is having none of it:

He most likely knew just what he was doing, overestimating only the traditional conservative willingness to lie down and take it.

What he wrote, though, was brave, very brave.

By the way . . .

Now that Wisconsin’s recent judicial election has at long last been settled in Prosser’s favor, there is no doubt who is really to blame for the problems that resulted in erroneous reporting which gave a narrow lead for the defeated liberal candidate. In the only truly non-partisan, non-ideological study of its kind, a special task force of the Milwaukee Police Department concluded that massive fraud and incompetence existed in Wisconsin’s election system. Republicans were eager to reform the system, but most Democrats refused to even discuss it. Despite the Democrats’ failure to act, no Democrat or liberal ever refuted the substance of the study, nor did they make any effort even to address the incompetence issue.

Why would the Democrats want to allow the incompetence in the system to stand? A cynic would say it would allow fraud to continue. In the police study, the police task force found that 16 staffers for the Democrat presidential campaign and a liberal allied group committed felony vote fraud and engaged in an “illegal organized attempt to influence the outcome of an election in the state of Wisconsin.”

Yet not one was prosecuted.

Prosecutors concluded that prosecution was impossible because

[b]ased on the investigation to date, the task force has found widespread record keeping failures and separate areas of voter fraud. These findings impact each other. Simply put: it is hard to prove a bank embezzlement if the bank cannot tell how much money was there in the first place. Without accurate records, the task force will have difficulty proving criminal conduct beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law.

In essence, because of the high level of incompetence in Wisconsin’s election administration, prosecuting those who committed “multiple felonies” of vote fraud was impossible.

Wisconsin Democrats could have joined with Republicans to ensure that elections are more open, fair, and honest, but Democrats opposed transparency and favored systems that encourage fraud like “Same Day Registration,” which employs tactics like vouching for votes. This encourages incompetence, making record keeping difficult and committing fraud easy. If Democrats had worked with Republicans to reform the system, then the April 5 Supreme Court election would have undoubtedly been over on election night.

Dan Collins

Dan Collins is a dude who blogs. He used to blog elsewhere. Now he blogs here.

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