A man who stopped his pickup truck at a site where signatures were being collected Thursday for the recall of Gov. Scott Walker ripped up one of the petitions instead of signing it, Madison police said.
The incident happened at about 10 a.m. in the 800 block of South Midvale Boulevard, said police spokesman Joel DeSpain.
The signature gatherers were holding signs and having vehicles pull into a parking lane when a driver in a red pickup stopped. When given a petition to sign, he ripped it up and drove away, DeSpain said. The destroyed petition had three signatures on it, he said.
Signature takers were able to get the license plate number, but police had not located the man as of Thursday afternoon, DeSpain said. Falsifying, defacing or destroying a recall petition is a felony punishable by up to three years and six months in prison and a $10,000 fine.
I think he should have to personally carry a new petition to the homes of the three people who signed the petition he ripped up, and get their signatures.
Because I know how you-all think, yes, felons can vote in Wisconsin upon completion of all supervised release.
(via) TPM
Yutsano
Are the signatures on the ripped petition still valid? Paging OO…
Mark B.
Wait, Walker drives a pickup truck? Well, maybe he ain’t so bad after all.
Frankensteinbeck
You know what I like about modern conservatism? It’s ALL CLASS.
debit
If they have the plate number, how is it they cannot locate the owner, who would, presumably, know who had been driving his truck around.
Andrew Abshier
Fred Thompson is in Wisconsin now? Who knew?
Punchy
Looks like WI recall petitions are going to need Secret Service detail.
pragmatism
just freedom of speech, ya know.
Ben Cisco
So dude was auditioning for a Fox show?
donnah
Ten bucks says he has truck nutz hanging from the hitch.
Villago Delenda Est
I am afraid this country is moving slowly, inexorably toward a situation not seen for 150 years.
Civility is breaking down. The neofeudalists know that they can’t win by conventional, civilized means.
Face
The real story is that this happened in ultra-liberal Madtown. Nary a winger in that area. He must have been bussed in and used a rental truck.
slag
Only if patchouli is involved. If I were a gambler, I’d bet that the strong arm of the law will be weak with this one.
The Ancient Randonneur
It was probably some DFH just trying to make conservatives look bad.
singfoom
I get it. The guy’s response to recalling Walker? “LETS TEAR THIS PLACE APART!!!”
The Other Bob
Why does a big chunk of stories written about the crazy action of an angry conservative male have to start with: “…pulled up in his pick up truck…”
My first vehicle was a truck and I have been driving them for the 24 years since. My pinko self does not fit the stereotype.
Excuse me, while I run out to buy a new pair of cowboy boots.
gbear
I had dinner with my sister who now lives near Green Bay, WI last night. One of the first things she told me was that she had signed the petition. She’s got a 6 year old kid so she really wants Walker out of there before he totally destroys the schools.
redshirt
@The Other Bob: Heh. I’ve got a big pickup with 2008 and 2012 Obama bumper stickers shining proudly. I hope I upend some folks expectations.
Zam
Had a few people give me the finger and one tell me to get a job, but nothing like this.
Zam
@The Other Bob: Actually the vehicles I was most surprised to see come in and sign the petition were the Escalades.
DS
When you get past all of the xenophobia, ra-ra nationalism and economic ridiculousness, Republicans are simply angry, selfish, hateful assholes. This pretty much explains all of their behavior in my opinion
Ivan Ivanovich Renko
@Villago Delenda Est: Call these bastards what they are– Confederates.
Ivan Ivanovich Renko
@singfoom: Confederates. “We will rule, or we will ruin.”
comrade scott's agenda of rage
@Frankensteinbeck:
Fixed.
Roger Moore
@DS:
FTFY. Xenophobia, ra-ra nationalism, and economic ridiculousness are the core of the Republican brand. If you get past them, you’re left with a bunch of people with nothing to unify them into anything vaguely resembling a party.
gnomedad
You can’t judge conservatives from the actions of random individuals. Only liberals.
Mark K
That guy (not his truck) is the epitome of everything that is wrong with this country.
What a coward! Don’t agree with somebody so you ruin everything? Geez…
harlana
geez, more temper tantrums. somebody get that man and Karl Rove their binkies, stat.
Roger Moore
@gnomedad:
You can’t judge conservatives by the actions of any conservative. You may only judge them by their stated principles must completely ignore their inability to live up to those principles in practice. For example, you have to accept that they’re focused on jobs because they say they are, rather than looking at their record of focusing exclusively on social issues and deregulation while ignoring 9+% unemployment.
eric
Let’s have a discussion thread: “Was Sherman wrong?”
rb
Falsifying, defacing or destroying a recall petition is a felony punishable by up to three years and six months in prison
OK, falsifying I can see. But ‘defacing’ a petition can get you 3.5 y? Christ, that’s pretty harsh.
(Not that this guy isn’t a giant asshole, and not that I think he’ll actually be punished in any way. And yes, I get the fact that illegally tinkering around with elections is death to democracy. But still, that seems like an awfully high upper limit on punishment for the crime of defacing a recall petition).
Catsy
@Villago Delenda Est: Except much, much uglier this time. Aside from modern weapons and higher population density, the two “sides” are deeply intermixed in most places rather than being geographically concentrated.
If there is ever a second American Civil War–a true “hot” war–it will be a nightmare the likes of which few in this country aside from Iraq and Afghanistan veterans have ever seen or can even imagine.
It would make Harry Turtledove’s alternate history novels in which the South won the Civil War and WWI/WWII were fought between the Union and Confederacy look optimistic.
Xecky Gilchrist
Yeah, back in my ’80s college days we hippies and the campus righties got in goofy fights over flyers we’d post on bulletin boards. We’d deface the righties’ stuff with scrawled notes making fun of their positions, and they’d tear ours down and throw them away. I always thought that was a good illustration of the difference between the camps.
Roger Moore
@rb:
Not at all. Destroying a petition is the mirror image of falsifying one. One is cheating in favor of the initiative and the other is cheating against the initiative. It’s logical that the punishments would be similar.
If anything, destroying a petition is worse. If the initiative gets on the ballot, voters who disagree still have a chance to vote against it during the election. If the only way the supporters can get it on the ballot is by falsifying petitions, the voters probably will wind up rejecting it anyway. But destroying petitions denies the voters who support the initiative from getting a chance to vote for it even if it has majority support.
Catsy
@rb: “Defacing” covers acts such as blacking out names/signatures so that they cannot be read (and therefore cannot count).
It’s not falsification–you’re not altering or misrepresenting information in a fraudulent way. And you’re not destroying the petition, so it doesn’t fall into that category either either. But you’re still disenfranchising someone, and that absolutely should be punished harshly.
Napoleon
@eric:
Yes, he left way too much of the South standing.
Unsympathetic
F that. The only thing I want to hear is “Book ‘im, Dan-o.”
I’m sick and tired of playing nice. It’s not just politics any more.
Mnemosyne
@Villago Delenda Est:
Meh. We haven’t even reached the same level of deadly violence as the early 1960s yet, when you had activists being gunned down in their driveways.
Not that a slide back to the worst days of the 1960s is all that much better, but violence-wise we’ve got a long ways to go in order to match the viciousness of only 40 years ago.
Mnemosyne
@Xecky Gilchrist:
It depends on what the others are posting — for a while, I made a point of tracking down and destroying all of the “white power” flyers I could find that some assholes were putting up around my school’s campus. That kind of shit has no place in a civil society and the best thing to do is to remove it.
MeDrewNotYou
@Mnemosyne: I disagree. I’m a proponent of the old, “The remedy to hate speech is more speech,” method. Put your own poster/flyer right next to it pointing out all the lies and idiocy and mocking them. Just destroying their speech brings us down to their level.
MeDrewNotYou
@MeDrewNotYou: Dammit. I’m in moderation. I think its because I’m using a different email. Can a front pager save me if that’s the case?
soonergrunt
@rb: I don’t have a problem with him getting a year’s probation, 100 hours of community service and a $1,000 fine.
Evolving Deep Southerner (tense changed for accuracy)
@Mnemosyne: I disagree. You must let an ass bray to know it is an ass.
JWL
Odds are Jethro was unaware of the 3 year 6 month rule. Odds are by now he’s heard he’s a wanted fugitive. Odds are his asshole is a bit puckered, and he’s been peeking thru the venetian blinds each time he hears a car drive by his digs.
Schlemizel
@eric:
Yes, Sherman was wrong – he stopped too soon. In retrospect Reconstruction was a mistake. Davis, Lee, the whole damn bunch of them should have been hung & their lands & fortunes forfeited. There should have been a law like Post WWII Germany making the display of Confederate garbage a crime.
Make7
I think he should get 100 hours of community service – and the community service has to be gathering signatures for the Walker recall petition.
Calouste
@Schlemizel:
And just like in post WWII Germany, the state boundaries should have been redrawn.
Mnemosyne
@MeDrewNotYou:
@Evolving Deep Southerner (tense changed for accuracy):
Sure, in the abstract, that’s a great idea. When you have these pieces of shit actually advocating violence and giving dates and times for rallies, I pull that down.
ETA: If you put a picture of a lynched corpse on your flyer as an example of what white people need to start doing again, I am not leaving that up in public for everyone to see. Sorry, I guess I’m just small-minded that way.
shortstop
That made me smile. And you’re right, we do.
shortstop
@Face: Untrue. This spring, while traveling in Greece, I had the misfortune of meeting Madison’s two conservatives. And goddamn, they were particularly offensive specimens of their kind.
Itinerant Pedant
@eric: No. He just didn’t go far enough.
Itinerant Pedant
BTW, True Story: While I was attending Field Artillery Officer School, one of the other guys said that if we held the Civil War again, the North would lose, because most of the Army bases were down South. Without missing a beat, I told him the South would still lose because all the SAC Missile Silos were up North.
He gave me a, “You wouldn’t!” look. I gave him a look that said, “You think Atlanta burned last time? Give me thirty seconds and a key.”
kideni
There are a fair number of conservatives in and around Madison: Republican elected officials all have like-minded people working for them, after all, and then there are lobbyists and whatnot. I suspect Dane County always be at least 30% Republican. One of Walker’s lead henchpeople has lived in one of the most liberal neighborhoods in Madison for over 20 years (as we all discovered when the FBI raided her house in September looking for evidence in a John Doe investigation). It does seem to mean that, per shortstop’s experience, the conservatives that do live here are particularly nasty (qv the vile Ann Althouse and her husband).
But hey, we collected over 50,000 signatures in the first 48 hours, so losing three isn’t a tragedy (and those three people can sign again if need be).
Seth Owen
@Pendant hey Red Leg! sure does seem like the South wants to make sure it has all the hardware in hand should the ‘unpleasantness’ erupts again. Don’t think it will help them any more than it did last time, though. They’re still surrounded.
Omnes Omnibus
@Itinerant Pedant: Let me just say that I really did not like Lawton.
No one of importance
@Itinerant Pedant:
“most of the Army bases were down South.”
Cool. The winners had the sense to keep the defeated territories occupied. So when the natives are revolting, the government has military personnel right fucking *there* to keep them in control.
Bet your Southern genius never thought of that either.
Omnes Omnibus
@No one of importance: It is the reason I always presumed.
The Other Chuck
@Itinerant Pedant:
The fact that the army is like more than half black doesn’t faze him? “They’re there to keep you crackers in line” is my unspoken response (probably for the best)
Madeline
@Face:Not only Madison, but near west side Madison. Sort of liberal heaven. I had heard this incident happened but didn’t know it happened in my neighborhood.
El Cid
@No one of importance: The military bases went to the South during WWII, since (a) it occurred to a variety of interested individuals that with German naval and air power, it wasn’t a great idea to have the vast concentration of US military bases in a small and vulnerable compact area in the Northeast near a few ports; (b) the Southern Democrats on whom FDR depended for a huge chunk of votes typically had extreme seniority on committees due to segregation and them Southron politicians loooooooved them some Yankee dollars; and (c) he and the rest of the US power establishment got tired of 1/3rd of the nation (the American South) being a completely underdeveloped 3rd world economy hellhole, so there needed to be a buildup of infrastructure, industry, and human capacity even there.
But, sure, I can see how my fellow white Southerners can often mistake this for a sign of conservative (white) Southern military prowess.