Good morning.
Thursday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 80. Sunrise is 6:05 AM and sunset 7:51 PM for 13h 46m 02s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 56.6% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Community Development Authority meets at 5:30 PM.
On this day in 1868, French astronomer Pierre Janssen discovers helium.
As one might have suspected, a detailed judicial view now confirms: Special Counsel Michael Gableman’s so-called election investigation was a million-dollar farce. Lawrence Andrea reports that Gableman ‘Accomplished nothing’: Judge admonishes Michael Gableman’s 2020 election review, bars lawyers from case:
For many months, former Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman’s taxpayer-funded review of the 2020 presidential election that has not produced any evidence of substantive voter fraud “accomplished nothing,” according to a Dane County judge.
Gableman didn’t keep weekly progress reports as required by the Wisconsin State Assembly.
He conducted no witness interviews.
And he gathered “no measurable data” over at least a four-month span in 2021, the judge found.
“Instead, it gave its employees code names like ‘coms’ or ‘3,’ apparently for the sole purpose of emailing back and forth about news articles and drafts of speeches,” Dane County Circuit Judge Frank Remington wrote in an opinion released Wednesday.
“It printed copies of reports that better investigators had already written,” Remington added, “although there is no evidence any person connected with (the Office of the Special Counsel) ever read these reports, let alone critically analyzed their factual and legal bases to draw his or her own principled conclusions.”
….
In the ruling, Remington admonished the Office of Special Counsel’s five out-of-state attorneys, including prominent conservative attorney James Bopp, for their “baseless” claims against him and revoked their ability to represent the Assembly’s office in the case.
“Its lawyers’ arguments are wholly without merit and, together, their disobedience for the rule of law is contemptuous,” Remington wrote of the attorneys.
“If this case were not on appeal,” he added, “I could sanction OSC and each of its seven lawyers for their specious legal arguments.”
A copy of the Supplement to the Court’s July 18, 2022 Decision Denying OSC’s Motion to Recuse appears below.
Nelson, NZ, Under State of Emergency After Heavy Flooding:
Vos hiring Gableman, and then not snuffing his investigation as soon as it became clear that Gableman had turned rogue, is one of the all-time stupidest moves in Wisco-World political history. Was Vos asleep during Gableman’s reign of error on the WiSC? I understand Robin was looking for a hack, but the Foley & Lardner and Troupis law offices are overflowing with much smoother hacks that would not have been the national embarrassment that Gableman was.
WMC, the Bradley Foundation and the Kochs have been mouse-like silent on this whole situation that they gestated by buying Gableman a seat on the Supreme Court. Smart move on their part.
Vos was clearly trying to fend off a right-flank attack with the whole “Special Counsel” scam, but it turned into an auto-applied personal dick-stomp of impressive dimensions. Vos knew it was bullshit all along, and finally admitted that fact, but managed to piss off everyone from Trump to coexist-stickered Prius drivers in the process. It almost got him un-elected, and will likely set off battle with the even more rabid Trumpers for the speakership after the elections.
That the D-Team failed to put up a candidate against him is evidence of a complete misunderstanding of political trade-craft. Bad on them!
Agreed all around. Vos waited too long, and has now cemented his reputation as a scaredy-cat Milquetoast. Spot on about Vos’s speakership — Vos hasn’t seen the last of Trump; there’s probably a dartboard with Vos’s picture at MAL. Sure enough: you can’t win seats you don’t contest. In a year like this, every seat deserves a contested race.