Friday, April 22, 2011

Candidates reach recount deal

By Jason Stein and Bill Glauber of the Journal Sentinel
April 21, 2011

Madison — Backing off stronger stances, Supreme Court Justice David Prosser and Assistant Attorney General JoAnne Kloppenburg found a courtroom compromise Thursday that called for a statewide recount, with a hand tally for ballots from the entire city of Milwaukee and other communities.

The hand recount will apply to ballots from some communities in 31 counties, including another 14 municipalities in Milwaukee County and 34 municipalities in Waukesha County. Dane County Circuit Judge Richard Niess approved the deal Thursday, allowing the first state recount in more than two decades to proceed with a cast that could include troops of observers for both sides.

"I think this is absolutely the right way to go," Niess said.

The deal came after Prosser representatives said he would strongly oppose any statewide recount as frivolous and Kloppenburg signaled that she wanted a hand recount of ballots from across the state.

The official tally in the race shows Kloppenburg lost to Prosser by 7,316 votes - less than 0.5% of the 1.5 million votes cast. The election initially appeared much closer, with Kloppenburg unofficially up by 204 votes. That was before Waukesha County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus announced her initial, unofficial tally given to news media on election night failed to include 14,315 votes from the city of Brookfield.

Minnesota journalist Jay Weiner and Washington, D.C., lawyer Chris Sautter, who have both written books on recounts, have said that it is unlikely to change the outcome in this race, though Sautter has said it's still worthwhile.

Attorneys for Kloppenburg and Prosser said the hand recount would be held in areas where older voting machines do not allow data to be copied. That would mean, absent a hand recount, that their data would have to be destroyed before the machines could be used to recount ballots.

Kloppenburg attorney Susan Crawford said that state law provides for a taxpayer-funded recount to candidates in Kloppenburg's position.

"We think this is a fair result," Crawford said.

Jim Troupis, an attorney for Prosser, said he stuck by earlier statements that the recount was "frivolous" and highly unlikely to change the outcome in the race. He claimed a recount could cost counties up to $1 million.

But "we're certainly comfortable with it," Troupis said of the compromise, noting it would allow the race to be resolved as quickly as possible.

Reid Magney, a spokesman for the state Government Accountability Board, said that the board expects to issue an order on Monday that would begin the recount on Wednesday. Magney said there are no reliable statewide cost estimates on what a recount might cost.

Magney said that the city of Brookfield would have a hand recount on ballots from two of its seven polling places. He said that at least for now, the court order is for the hand recount to proceed in the select areas of the 31 counties, even if it turns out that some of the voting machines in question actually can preserve their data.

Milwaukee's data could be preserved, according to Neil Albrecht, deputy director of the city Election Commission. He said city election officials routinely copy voting machines' data into computer software that keeps the results by ward and has been ruled to meet state records retention requirements.

Including Milwaukee in a hand recount could have a significant impact on the length and cost of the process, although no specific figures are available. Milwaukee is by far the state's largest municipality, with 312 wards. Milwaukee County Election Administrator Lisa Weiner estimated that a hand recount could take twice as long as a machine recount, with county taxpayers picking up the tab for city poll workers' time and other expenses.

In areas where there is no hand recount, ballots would be recounted by the same machines or other methods used to count them the first time. Even in those areas, elections officials and observers for the campaigns still will be able to look at individual ballots.

Troupis said he expected that Prosser's campaign could have hundreds of volunteer recount observers traveling to Wisconsin from around the country.

Crawford said Kloppenburg's campaign hoped and expected that the recount could be finished within the deadline in state law of 13 days from the date of the accountability board's order.

By law, the memory devices in voting machines cannot be cleared for 21 days after an election or during a recount.

But Steve Means, executive assistant to Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen, said that Van Hollen believed the best way to move forward would have been to verify the results in the specific machines and then erase those data. That's because by state law, a hand recount should only happen when it can be demonstrated in court to be more accurate than a machine count, he said.

But after hearing that concern, Niess moved forward with the deal.
Meeting denied

Meanwhile Thursday, Prosser angrily repeated his denial that he met with Gov. Scott Walker shortly after the court election, denouncing Kloppenburg's campaign for making the claim.

Melissa Mulliken, the campaign manager for Kloppenburg, made the claim Wednesday in a complaint filed with the accountability board. That complaint sought an inquiry into Nickolaus, not Prosser.

Citing unnamed sources, Mulliken alleges Prosser had a one-on-one meeting with Walker, a Republican, on the day after the election - a loaded allegation in an officially nonpartisan race in which the candidates questioned each other's claims of political independence. The next day, Walker's administration asked the Supreme Court to quickly get involved in a Dane County case that has blocked implementation of Walker's controversial plan to sharply limit collective bargaining for public employees.

Prosser said that since the election he hasn't met in private with either the governor or any of his staff.

"The idea that I would go to the governor's office is just patently untrue. There is not a shred of evidence. That is pure malice," Prosser said Thursday in an interview.

Walker aide Chris Schrimpf also denied Wednesday that the two officials met on April 6.

Crawford said Thursday that Mulliken felt her sources were reliable but would not reveal them since she didn't want to taint any possible investigation.

Larry Sandler of the Journal Sentinel staff contributed to this article from Milwaukee.

http://www.jsonline.com/news/statepolitics/120373999.html

15 Easy Ways to Really Cut Your Consumption

By Sara Novak
Wed Sep 9, 2009 11:25

Consumption costs us money and the more simply we choose to live the more money we can save. The thing is, no matter how eco-friendly the products that we buy may be, they still come with packaging, they still take energy to make, and they are nearly always still trucked from somewhere. My biggest/most obvious eco-friendly tip of the year is consuming less (energy, water, "stuff,") is better for the planet.

Easy ways to cut your consumption:

1. Bring a reusable bag wherever you go. Excess bags just add to the landfill and you don't need them in the first place. There's no reason not to do this. Try an easy Chico bag you can carry with you.

2. Ditch the processed food. It takes unnecessary energy to produce it, as well as tons of packaging.

3. Make your own cleaning products. Cleaning products (even eco-friendly varieties) often come in plastic bottles and they are trucked in from who knows where wasting tons of fossil fuels.

4. Calculate your water footprint. How can you know where you need to cut water usage if you don't know how much you're using and where you're using it?

5. Don't drink milk. Livestock consumes much of the land on the planet, whether for meat or dairy, and creates literally tons and tons of pollution, estimates are in the 1/5th of all greenhouse gases range.

6. Wear less makeup. Using less makeup will save us on resources and money, and you'll look better too.

7. Drink less bottled water, try to drink none. The U.S. sends two million tons of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottled water packaging to the landfill each year. Just drink the tap.

8. Wash your clothes in cold water. About 90 percent of the energy used for washing clothes is for heating the water.

9. Pass up the fast food joint, bring your own grub. Let me count the reasons why. There's the immense shipping programs emitting harmful gases, the millions of tons of waste generated annually, and not to mention the total lack of nutritional value in fast food restaurant's most popular menu items.

10. Skip Starbucks and brew your own coffee. Once we factor in the cost of the gourmet coffee and the cost of driving there, each time we brew a cup at home, we save about the equivalent of a gallon of gas.

11. Shut down your PC. If every American worker remembers to turn off their computer at night, the nation's companies would prevent the release of 39,452 tons of carbon-dioxide emissions, save $4.7 million in utility costs, and reduce energy consumption by 54.3 million kilowatt-hours per day.

12. Skip the store bought cereal and make your own granola instead. Cereal usually comes in a plastic bag within a cardboard box that all gets thrown away at least once a week if not more.

13. Become a weekday vegetarian. By cutting meat out of your diet entirely you save 5,000 lbs of carbon emissions per year, so even reducing your meat intake to two out of seven days will still make a big difference.

14. Grow some of your own food. This way you don't have to buy it and it's about as local as possible.

15. Add insulation to your attic. The Rocky Mountain Institute estimates it will save you 2,142 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions--through the heat your home retains in winter and doesn't gain in the summer--and hundreds of dollars in lower energy bills.

http://planetgreen.discovery.com/home-garden/easy-ways-cut-consumption.html

Sen. Ensign Resigns Amid Ethics Probe

April 22, 2011 at 8:20 AM EDT
By: David Chalian and Quinn Bowman

Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev.

Sen. John Ensign is being investigated for his handling of an affair with a former political aide. File photo by Getty Images.

The Morning Line

Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., is resigning from his seat in order to avoid further investigation and action from the Senate Ethics Committee looking into any possible wrongdoing related to his affair with a former senior aide's wife.

"It is with tremendous sadness that I officially hand over the Senate seat that I have held for eleven years. The turbulence of these last few years is greatly surpassed by the incredible privilege that I feel to have been entrusted to serve the people of Nevada," Ensign said in a statement.

"While I stand behind my firm belief that I have not violated any law, rule, or standard of conduct of the Senate, and I have fought to prove this publicly, I will not continue to subject my family, my constituents, or the Senate to any further rounds of investigation, depositions, drawn out proceedings, or especially public hearings. For my family and me, this continued personal cost is simply too great," he added.

U.S. Senate Select Committee on Ethics Chairwoman Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., and Vice Chairman Johnny Isakson, R-Ga., issued a two-sentence statement that appeared to be the equivalent of "good riddance."

"The Senate Ethics Committee has worked diligently for 22 months on this matter and will complete its work in a timely fashion. Senator Ensign has made the appropriate decision," they said.

Ensign said his resignation will become effective May 3. A former senator is not subject to penalty or further investigation from the Senate Ethics Committee.

Politically, Ensign's resignation can have significant impact on what's expected to be one of the most high-profile senate races of the cycle. If Republican Gov. Brian Sandoval appoints Rep. Dean Heller to the seat, Heller will get to run for election with some of the trappings of incumbency.

This would no doubt complicate what Democrats see as one of their best pickup opportunities in the country in a year when most of their time is going to be spent playing defense.

With the GOP only four seats away from a majority in the Senate, a complicating factor thrown into one of the Democrats' most promising pickup opportunities is welcome news at the National Republican Senatorial Committee.

"There will be a very clear choice for Nevadans between an uncompromising extremist like Dean Heller, who wants to end Medicare and cut loans for small businesses to give more tax breaks for the very rich, and Shelley Berkley, a true fighter for Nevada's economy and middle class. Nevada will remain a top target for Senate Democrats," said Guy Cecil, executive director of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, in an attempt to put a good face on the unwelcome news.

If Rep. Heller gets the appointment as expected, he vacates a competitive House seat for which a special election will take place this year, providing a great opportunity to see how the political terrain has shifted, if at all, since 2010 in a major battleground state.



http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2011/04/post-14.html

Study estimates that illegal immigrants paid $11.2B in taxes last year, unlike GE, which paid zero

Albor Ruiz - Ny Local
Wednesday, April 20th 2011, 4:00 AM


I bet most of you didn't know undocumented immigrants contributed more - much more - to the national treasury last year than General Electric. Surprised? Yet it's true.

While GE - which earned a whopping $14 billion last year - is reported to have paid nothing, nada, zero in taxes (GE denies it), the undocumented paid billions in state and local taxes in 2010.

No, it's not me talking; it's the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy (itepnet.org), a prestigious, nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization that works on federal, state and local tax policy issues.

Obviously the old saying, "Nothing is certain but death and taxes," is not to be believed anymore. Or rather, only half of it can be believed.

Because death, of course, remains as dreaded and inevitable as ever, but with taxes the story is different.

"The rich are different from you and me," the famous F. Scott Fitzgerald quote, is a much more accurate description of what's going on in the country.

To no one's surprise, taxes are still as certain for working people - and whatever is left of the middle class - as they ever were. But for, well, GE and other corporate giants, the only certainty is that many found ways to contribute as little to the country's coffers as possible.

At the same time, Republicans in Washington are involved in a mighty struggle to protect the tax breaks of the country's richest 2%, while happily proposing to cut the most basic social services to Americans who really need them.

Closer to home, Gov. Cuomo has announced the so-called millionaires tax will not be renewed once it expires in December, although since it was established in 2009 it has brought in as much as $5 billion annually.

There is no doubt, when it comes to taxes the rich are really different.

Ironically the vilified undocumented population, among the poorest and most vulnerable in the country, does its part when it comes to taxes.

They pay sales taxes and property taxes - even if they rent, ITEP said. At least half of them pay income taxes. And, I believe, if they were ever legalized, close to 100% would do the same. "Add this all up," ITEP said, "and it amounts to billions in revenue to state and local governments."

ITEP estimates that households that are headed by undocumented immigrants (which may include members who are U.S. citizens or legal immigrants) paid $11.2 billion in state and local taxes last year. That included $1.2 billion in personal income taxes, $1.6 billion in property taxes and $8.4 billion in sales taxes.

New York is fourth in the country in tax revenue - $662.4 million - from households headed by undocumented immigrants, after California, Texas and Florida.

"These figures should be kept in mind as politicians and commentators continue with the seemingly endless debate over what to do with unauthorized immigrants already living in the United States," ITEP wisely advises.

"[These] immigrants - and their family members - are adding value to the U.S. economy; not only as taxpayers, but as workers, consumers and entrepreneurs as well."

Enough with those people - and they are many - who think they are the only ones paying taxes, and who accuse the undocumented of being "leeches" who contribute nothing. How about redirecting their fury to the real leeches, those with enough means and political clout to exploit every single loophole in our tax laws not to pay their fair share?

aruiz@nydailynews.com

http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/2011/04/20/2011-04-20_undocumented_unlike_rich_pay_plenty_in_taxes.html