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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsWisconsin GOP playbook works to perfection
The author is not a politician and is not personally involved in politics; he's a professional historian. The strategies he describes are what allowed the Republicans to dismantle democracy in Wisconsin.
Is this also happening in your state?
http://www.jsonline.com/news/opinion/wisconsin-gop-playbook-works-to-perfection-b99639605z1--363946401.html?ipad=y
2) Keep the other team's fans out of the stadium. Despite the pious Republican rhetoric about the "sanctity of the vote," the fact is that voter fraud in Wisconsin is rare. That hasn't stopped the GOP from enacting "reforms" including mandatory voter IDs and limitations on polling hours that have a disproportionate impact on low-income urban voters, i.e., people who tend to vote Democratic. The effect is even more nefarious than it might seem because the fans in the stands don't just make noise: They choose the players on the field.
3) Slash your opponent's payroll. Act 10, which gutted public employee unions, was sold as another "reform" to protect the state's "hardworking taxpayers" from those maligned public servants who teach our children, but one of the law's side effects produced a touchdown for the Republicans. Dues-paying union members tend to vote Democratic, and crippling unions inevitably crippled their ability to support Democratic campaigns. The Republicans doubled down on the strategy with last year's right-to-work law, an attempt to weaken private-sector unions and shrink their campaign coffers in the process.
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6) Fire the referees. If you don't like their rulings, get rid of the officials. In 2012, the Government Accountability Board, a nonpartisan group of retired judges, began to look into collusion between Republican candidates and outside funders, sparking a John Doe probe that went on for more than two years. The GOP cried foul and took the GAB's whistles away, replacing the board with two partisan bodies.
Octafish
(55,745 posts)From PRwatch and the Center for Media and Democracy (ALEC Exposed), the SPN in PDF form:
http://www.prwatch.org/files/spn_national_report_final.pdf
Thank you for the OP, Scuba. John Gurda put it in black-and-white for us.
BTW: That photo of the Wisco brain trust makes me want to breathe through my mouth to avoid having the smell filling my brain.
Scuba
(53,475 posts)Octafish
(55,745 posts)Huh?
http://www.freep.com/story/news/politics/2015/10/24/emergency-manager-law-blame-flint-water-crisis/74048854/
If not, you are so lucky. Things could be so much worse. Like here in Michigan, with the lead in the little children of Flint and all.
You Packer fans are amateurs when it comes to suffering.