No Runny Eggs

(H/T – Owen)

A short 4 years after Jim “Craps” Doyle (WEAC/HoChunk-For Sale) coerced the former State Elections Board to take the unprecedented step of disallowing the bulk of a planned transfer of funds from former Rep. Mark Green’s federal campaign fund to his state gubernatorial campaign fund, he has found another way around the limitations on political donations in Wisconsin. MacIver News Service reports:

According to the most recent filings by Doyle for Wisconsin, the Governor’s campaign account had a cash balance of $1,826,791.21 in July.

The Greater Wisconsin Committee’s Political Action Committee’s report filed this week indicates that account has since been depleted by more than half.

The Governor’s campaign committee made million dollar the donation in two $500,000 disbursements, dated August 2nd and August 18th.

See the campaign finance report, here.

The Greater Wisconsin Committee PAC has been running television ads in markets across the state critical of Republican Gubernatorial candidate Scott Walker….

That’s right – even though no campaign committee can donate more than $43,128 (or 4% of what a gubernatorial campaign that accepts public financing can spend) to a gubernatorial campaign, and lesser amounts to other campaigns in Wisconsin, in an election cycle, that same committee can donate an unlimited amount of money to a PAC. That Doyle chose to give the lion’s share to the sleaziest operation in Wisconsin so they could slime Walker speaks volumes.

Given almost the entirety of GWC’s warchest came from Doyle, with just $251,000 over the first 8 months of 2010 coming from other sources, perhaps their ads should have as the disclaimer, “Paid for by Doyle for Wisconsin”. The ugly news is they still have $594,000 in the bank waiting for the winner of the GOP nomination, which would give the Barrett team over $3 million to work with on September 15.

Revisions/extensions (2:25 pm 9/8/2010) – Christian Schneider reminds us that Doyle could have given the money to the Common School Fund, but decided getting a third term by proxy was more important than helping the children.

(H/T – Charlie Sykes)

Damn if I didn’t call this one back in April when Kevin Binversie noticed the Democrats were busy trying to “deconflict” the one “major” primary they had going, their lieutenant governor race. Uppity Wisconsin made the effort to get Mark Neumann selected as the Republican nominee for governor official, noting he would be “a weak general election gubernatorial candidate.”

To set up for this, they even managed to quash any serious competition in the suddenly-opened 7th Congressional race out despite Senate Democrat leader Russ Decker’s decades-long lusting after the seat. The bad news, at least for them, is they didn’t quite finish “deconflicting” their lieutenant governor race by “encouraging” State Senator Spencer Coggs (D-Milwaukee) to drop out the way they did Milwaukee Alderman Tony Zielinski, which would have cleared the field for outstate Assemblyman Tom Nelson. Worse, for everybody involved, the Milwaukee Democrats are insisting on party purity in both the Sheriff’s office and the 7th Senate District, so the biggest potential “Astro-swell” for Neumann is effectively out of play.