He Shall Be Known By The Company He Keeps

If you look at the long, long list of Scott Walker's cronies, you can see what type of person Walker is.

On the radio, he is buddies with the libelous, adulterous Charlie Sykes and the drunken brawler Vicki McKenna. He also has found allies in the such as the greedy and amoral Koch Brothers, the Bradley Foundation, a swift boater in Texas and scofflaws like Nicholas Hurtgen and Mark Block.

And who could ever forget his best friends, like Tim Russell, Kelly Rindfleisch and Darlene Wink.

And that's just barely scratching the surface of the miscreants and reprobates Walker is wont to surround himself with.

Now, he's got a new group of "friends" that he is relying on to pull his hide out of trouble.

The people I'm referring to is the King Street Patriots, a teahadist group out of Texas, who are the people behind the "True the Vote" project. Walker is counting on this group to be able to successfully sue the GAB into taking their "findings" into account and they go about certifying the recall petitions. Apparently he couldn't find enough people in Wisconsin, despite having $12 million he could have paid them with, to be willing to stand up for him. That alone should tell you something.

But Walker's reliance on this group will bring about even bigger problems for him.

His first problem is that they're going to make him look like an even bigger fool than he already does. The "True the Vote" group is actually claiming that the recallers don't have enough signatures to trigger a recall of Walker. But the good people at PR Watch is already on top of it and found that this group started out with phony numbers and made some wild and unsubstantiated assumptions:

True the Vote states that volunteers from around the U.S. entered approximately 820,000 of the recall signatures into a database developed by True the Vote, and their analysis showed that only 534,685 recall signatures are eligible, almost 6,000 short of the required 540,000 mark. Their executive summary states they only processed 138,203 of the total 152,508 petitions submitted – meaning over 14,305 pages were never entered. True the Vote boasts in their summary that each signature line was entered an average of 2.67 times. It is not known why they entered names and signatures nearly three times each into the database but failed to input the complete data set.

The group claims that less than the necessary 540,000 signatures are eligible “based on data available.” According to their summary, out of the nearly 820,000 signatures reviewed, 55,608 were deemed “ineligible” and an additional 228,940 signatures required “further investigation,” leaving only 534,685 eligible.

Their assumption appears to be that every single one of the 228,940 signatures they flagged “for further investigation” will turn out to in fact be ineligible. They are also assuming that the over 55,608 signatures they deemed “ineligible” would not be counted under Wisconsin law. They are further assuming that every signature on the 14,305 pages they never counted is invalid.

They then go on to examine, parse and fisk some of the names that "True the Vote" is claiming to be invalid. The TtV claims don't hold any water under even the simplest of examinations and only shows how fraudulent Walker's and their claims really are.

But the fraudulent claims from these teahadists might be the least of Walker's problems. His bigger issue is that he should have taken a look at them before hitching his campaign wagon to them.

TtV and its parent group, King Street Patriots, have shown suspicious behavior surrounding a mysterious fire in Houston Texas. When a fire of unknown origin destroyed all the voting machines in a prominently minority area of Houston, this group came out with a distinctly racist video (which they've since taken down) claiming rampant voter fraud, as part of a larger scheme of voter suppression.*

As if that wasn't enough evidence of the groups' racism, they became openly hostile to a Houston-based GOTV group, sending them rants and threatening messages, including this profanity-laden, horribly-misspelled doozy:

“You liberial scumbags should be hung by the neck in public ! We are on to your voter fraud. Keep it up you MOTHER FUCKERS and you will soon be put down for a long dirt nap! Your nothing but a bunch of white guilt ridden assholes, NIGGERS and greasy mexican spics! The WAR is comming and we are going to dispose of each and every one of you while we take OUR (White) nation back.”

The Democratic Party has a list of even more garbage these bigoted sociopaths have done, including photoshopping a woman's sign from "Don't mess with our vote" to "I only got to vote once." (The phosphorescent purple in comic sans was a dead give away, although I am surprised it was spelled correctly.)

As the saying goes, "One shall be known by the company they keep." If these racist, scurrilous and fraudulent fools are the people that Walker wants to associate with and use for his support, that's fine. But let's make sure everyone in the state know that these are the values and attitudes he is embracing with both arms.

*If the Republicans' agenda and plans were so wonderful, why do they keep trying to keep people from voting?