Update: See A Dose of Reality on the ACORN Hysteria.
Face it Republicans, you are going to lose and you are going to lose big.

But not without a lot of whining and lying first.

Brad Friedman eviscerates the GOP voter fraud lie aimed at the group ACORN, the Association for Community Organisations for Reform Now.

The crimes of ACORN are as Friedman writes in The Guardian:

... that Acorn managed to register some 1.3 (million) low-income (read: Democratic-leaning) voters over the past two years. The rest is, pretty much, just made up. ... Despite the screaming wall-to-wall coverage of 'Democratic voter fraud in 11 swing states' as seen on Fox News and even the once-respectable CNN, none of it's true.

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.

Nothing reveals the pathology of power so much as the monumental harm that we intentionally bequeath our children.

A $9 trillion debt, a government thrown into fiscal crisis, corruption, war; these are the Bush-Cheney endowments to future generations.

Gov. Doyle deserves recognition for one small step in the right direction on care-taking the environment.

Reports Bill Novak at the Cap Times (Wisconsin Gov says no to coal for state power plants): 

Using coal at state-owned heating plants is not an option that should be considered as a fuel source, according to a directive issued Friday by Gov. Jim Doyle.

The directive to move away from coal is in line with recommendations made by the governor's task force on global warming.

Republicans, as usual, have their undies in a bundle about Jim Doyle, claiming this time that he shouldn't have even stopped by at his own golf fundraiser Tuesday, a day he also devoted a lot of time to dealing with flood damage in the state.

One right-wing blogger has even started a poll about whether Doyle should donate the money to flood relief.

So, what was the unannounced Republican candidate for governor doing on Tuesday? Milwaukee County Exec Scott Walker was in Hayward and Rhinelander, raising money for a GOP State Senate candidate, Tom Tiffany -- and collecting some political IOUs for his campaign for gov.

Tuesday's calendar from WisPolitics:

Lunch with 12th SD candidate Tom Tiffany 6/10/2008 12 p.m. Lumberjack Steakhouse, 15860 T-Bone Lane, Hayward. County Executive Scott Walker $25 suggested minimum contribution PAC Accepted

Reception with 12th SD candidate Tom Tiffany 6/10/2008 5 p.m. Wisconsin River Cruises, 913 W. Kemp St., Rhinelander. Special Guest: County Executive Scott Walker $25 suggested minimum contribution PAC Accepted

Once again, the story is what you don't know if you rely on the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

You undoubtedly know that Wisconsin ranks high among the 50 states in how much taxes its citizens pay. The media, including the JS, have been reporting it for years.

So when there's what qualifies as at least a minor man-bites-dog story -- or at least man-growls-at-dog story -- on the same topic, you'd expect to read it.

Guess again. We'll let Bruce Murphy of Milwaukee Magazine take it from here:

On May 27, the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance did a new report showing Wisconsin dropped out of the ranks of the 10 highest-taxed states for the first time in more than 25 years. Indeed, going all the way back to 1963, when the state first adopted a sales tax, Wisconsin has ranked in the top 10 every year except 1980 and 1968.

As recently as 1999, when Republican Gov. Tommy Thompson was near the end of his long tenure, Wisconsin ranked as the third-highest taxed state. Today, Wisconsin has dropped to 11th-highest. That’s quite a change, and it got extensive coverage in the Wisconsin State Journal . The story was picked up by other newspapers statewide.